Canada Prep 2026, Part II: The Summer of Evolution

 So we're in the last week of April now, having thankfully dodged a number of severe weather threats and most other crises, and it's time to get back to the grind and to continue plotting the next big event on the horizon, which remains...the Canada trip. 

It's hard to believe that two months from now, we will have gone to Canada and will have already returned home, but it's true, and it's coming up faster than we think. There are a lot of items on my to-do list that still need to be accomplished, and a lot happening in the time between now and when we leave that is unrelated and/or otherwise completely separate from the trip itself, yet still needs to be done before we leave.

I mentioned here that the Great Closet Purge of 2026™ is done, at least on my part. I now have an astounding amount of closet space compared to before, and my final three bags of donations are set to be dropped off at Goodwill this coming weekend. All in all, I cleared out roughly half, maybe a little more, of my entire wardrobe. If I hadn't worn it in years, it was donated. If I would never wear it or wear it again, it was donated. If it didn't bring me joy at the same levels as my favorite clothing, it was donated. I am evolving as a human when it comes to possessions -- if I don't need it and it's simply something I've acquired over the years, it gets sold or donated. I don't have time or space for all of the stuff I've gathered over the years, and it all must go. Tough choices were made. Things I loved but couldn't see a use for were gotten rid of. Things I may want or need in the future, I gave a long hard look to, and decided if I ever have a use for a particular item again, I'd just buy new. 

I cannot tell you how many pairs of winter gloves I came across in my purge, or how many Covid-era hand-sewn or otherwise purchased cloth face masks I found. These were all laundered and set aside in storage. I can't tell you how many pairs of socks I've acquired over the past several years, only that about once or twice a year I will purchase a new pack of socks and rarely clear out the old ones. Well, now all the old ones are cleared out. 

I cannot tell you how many pairs of flip-flops and sandals I donated or outright tossed, as I get probably ten or so new pairs a year to help cycle out the old ones that wear out. Some of the newer ones I end up wearing once, hating, and then donating. This probably sounds wasteful to you, but I'm sure the people who shop at thrift stores will appreciate some new sandals. I have no need to buy any new flip-flops or sandals for years as of right now -- I still have some that are barely used and a few other pairs still in their packaging, pairs that I know I love since I have the same ones in other colors. 

That being said, I'm always on the lookout for new, good sandals.

As for actual shoes, I mentioned before that I'd found a lot of old pairs of shoes that I'd either never worn or had worn once or twice and never again. Those all got donated -- even my black combat boots. I haven't worn those boots in at least five years, probably longer. They're a pain in the ass to get on and off and if I need new boots I'll be looking for a more comfortable, practical pair. I made sure to keep a few pairs of actual shoes that I really love wearing, and the rest were donated. 

That being said, I'm always on the lookout for new, comfortable and breathable daily shoes, too. I've got a few pairs, but my Hey Dudes are my go-to pair these days if I need to wear shoes somewhere. 

I'm down to my last three vapes. I told Daisy over the weekend that by the end of the week, I will be off nicotine completely, for better or worse. I'd like to try just going without, cold turkey style, if possible, to see how I feel, before I go on the Chantix. If I don't need the Chantix, I don't need it -- if it becomes very apparent that I do need it, I have it at the ready, of course. 

Any nicotine mints and gum I had in the house has already been thrown out so that I am not tempted, along with any and all of my other vape-related things -- at great cost to myself -- so that I can commit to this. I am a bit nervous and apprehensive, but I want to be done with it. I want to know what living without a chemical addiction is really like. I want my brain and body to normalize, completely without nicotine, for the first time since I was in college. Since I was a teenager.

Truth be told, since the pandemic or so it has been a nightmare to be a vaper. Ten years ago it was a vaper's paradise, where you could go anywhere on any website and get anything you wanted, juice in any flavor, any tank or device you thought would work best for you, and you could go to one of many shops in pretty much any city or place you lived in and get supplies. Companies were hosting "cloud competitions," where you won prizes for blowing the biggest clouds of vape. It was a wild time.

However, all sorts of regulations kicked in, most shops began closing their doors, flavors were discontinued, and almost every single website I ever got anything from shut down, most of them very quickly and unceremoniously. The ones who didn't close up shop moved heavily to disposable devices that fell into regulation loopholes, and because of that they could jack prices through the roof as they were now the devices of favor. My own local store struggled heavily and probably still does, though I have not been in there for probably two years or more now. I found one site, one site, where I could get a lot of what I wanted or needed, and used that store a lot all the way through, oh, probably Christmas or so, before I realized that I was spending so much money on this shit for very little return and I just wanted to be done. 

So, I'm down to my last three disposable vapes. It is what it is. Once I'm done, I'm done. I don't want to look back, I don't want to crave nicotine anymore, I just want it all washed out of my system and to be done. And yes, it's likely going to be hard for those first few days or weeks. Daisy is aware of this and asked me to give her warning, asked me to let her know when I was totally done so that she could steel herself against the attitude shift I will almost certainly have, but that's it. And I may or may not use the Chantix. I have a wait and see approach to it and I'd like to do a little research on it before I stick it in my body and hope for the best. 

Anyway.

I mowed the front and back yards on Saturday for the first time this year. They still look awful, but they look considerably less awful than before, as they were basically a jungle before I mowed. There are a ton of tall dandelions that are still sticking up that the mower didn't get, but I can go back over everything again this weekend and make things look good, and likely do the string trimming too. I did a little of that on Saturday as well.

Mama is in Denver right now; she has gone out there for a surgery on her tooth by a dentist Daisy's sister is friends with, as he was able to get her in without waiting another month. She flew out there on Friday and will be back home sometime this next week, likely. The procedure was successful and she's recovering in the home of Daisy's sister at this time, and getting some family visit time in before she comes back.

Work has been...trying. I've mentioned before that we're constantly understaffed and every night is a struggle -- well, that's always been the case to one degree or another. However, over the past few weeks, we've had some leadership out on vacation or otherwise out of the office for a few days' worth of time, and that tends to throw everything into disarray. It means I tend to do double or triple the normal amount of work on any given night and I am...fairly bitter about that. Part of the reason I stay at my job is that it pays me well for what I do and generally as long as I perform the basics of my job's functions, I'm mostly left alone. All this extra accountability and responsibility when other leadership is out of the office is honestly for the birds, man.  A decade ago, I jumped at any possible opportunity to prove myself -- now, older and wiser, I'm tired and am very much like "let the kids do that shit, I'm done going above and beyond, just give me my fucking paycheck and leave me alone." I think they refer to this sort of behavior as "quiet quitting" -- doing the job just well enough to not get fired. I'm not quite all the way there yet, but I feel myself getting to that point, slowly, I'm already at the point where my answer to the question "why was this missed" or "why did this not get done" is "because I'm one person doing three jobs, and I have three people under me on overnights now when I used to have eight." I'm no longer sugarcoating things to our higher leadership with my responses when our current situation remains untenable. 

It also just comes down to, as I've mentioned here many times before, being done wanting to work at all anymore. I've been working pretty nonstop for the past 25 years in one form or another, and I'd really like to be done now. It's no longer fun, it's no longer fulfilling, and I've given up every dream I've had in order to just be able to pay bills. It's a pretty miserable existence.

April Showers, Part VII: Air'd Out

 Well, hello.

The new AC unit is installed, and the storms mostly missed us. 

So, let's get into the story.

On Thursday morning, I had just gotten off work and had gone to sleep for a couple of hours before the guys arrived. Daisy was able to get up and take care of them, letting them in and letting them begin their work. I attempted to go back to sleep for a few more hours, but that was not, apparently, in the cards as Dolly and Gary were both wildly curious about the HVAC guys, and Daisy had to close them up in the bedroom with me.

Do you know what that means? It means that as soon as they were locked in the bedroom with me -- mind you, I'm in bed, still in my underwear, still mostly asleep -- they were on me, crying, like "Dad! DAD! There are men in the house!" Etc.

Well, there was no sleeping through that. 

There was no way I was going back to sleep. And I'd slept a little less than three hours or so, give or take, before they'd arrived -- so I was mostly okay. Tired, yes. But, mostly okay. So, at 10am, after working until 6am, taking a shower, and going to bed...I was up and mobile for the day. 

Within twenty minutes of me being up and out of bed, I looked out of my office window to find the old unit already in the yard and disassembled and the new unit on the slab being installed. They were moving fast. Apparently, according to Daisy, one guy was outside and the other was on the inside in our utility closet, feeding wiring through the wall conduit and setting up the new inside-the-house coil, working in tandem. They had to build an entirely new metal housing inside the closet above the new furnace and install some sort of control mechanism that they called a "dragonfly" on the wall of the new part of the system inside the house. It was, apparently, a lot more complicated than "unplug old unit, remove old unit, place new unit, plug in new unit" because it's not the 1970s anymore and these new systems are way more high-tech than the 50-year-old shitbox we had attached to our house previously.

So, at this juncture, what was I to do? Daisy was downstairs keeping tabs on the cats and essentially supervising the workers (she would tell them "I'm not hovering, please don't think that, I'm just trying to keep the cats away from the doors and the closet and make sure they don't bother you or get into your stuff") and I was awake when I didn't want to be. 

So, I caught up on some of my Youtube channels and kept a close eye on the storms that were rolling in. I didn't have much of a choice. It was gearing up to be, as mentioned, the "nightmare scenario" of these techs racing the clock, trying to get this done so they could go home for the day and take shelter. Mind you, Daisy takes this stuff in stride, with a very "whatever will be, will be" mentality -- she's downstairs on her phone on the couch, browsing through vegan recipes and I'm the one who's up here plotting out the possible paths of storms based on the radar, and trying to calculate timing. 

What started out as a beautiful morning gradually got darker and darker. This did not seem to faze these HVAC guys, who as far as I saw did not even take a break while they worked.

Daisy texted me from the downstairs around noon, telling me that she wanted me down there by 1 or so, as she would be starting her work for the day at 1:30 and wanted a little decompression time. So, shortly before 1, I went downstairs to observe and report. She hung around for a bit and then went back upstairs to do her work for the day.

I should mention that all this time, the cats were terrified. The work had been done outside for the most part, and they were now focusing on working in the utility closet to finish up the wiring and connections. They also had to build a new aluminum housing for, I guess, some of the new components that were installed in a sort of stacked configuration above and on top of the furnace, and that involved a lot of banging and drilling and impact-wrenching. I don't think I have ever seen Hank so scared in his life. Emmy decided to just hide in their play tunnel and ignore the world. The others would venture out every once in a while when the noises stopped out of sheer curiosity, but any sudden movements or loud noises would send them flying back out of the room and upstairs. 

I had brought down my tablet, my phone, and my vape to sit on the couch for observation. I thought it would be rude were I to put on Netflix or something, but if I was bored I could at least play some games on my phone or read a book on Kindle. Throughout the next hour or so, the sky got darker and darker, to the point where it began to look like nightfall was coming outside. Eventually I relented and turned on the local weather on the TV, and kept the volume as low as possible (at like, 1 or 2), so we could have some warning if the storms were moving in. The storms at that time were all around us, but weren't close enough to hit us. Numerous severe thunderstorm watches, warnings, and tornado watches and warnings were popping up all over the area, but none of them within 30-40 miles of us -- so it was a morbid curiosity at best. 

By around 2:30 or so, they were mostly finished, and started gathering their tools. They turned the system on and immediately the house began cooling down -- by a lot. The new AC was far quieter than the old one and it seemed to work wildly well. They wrapped everything up, took their stuff out the back door, and I was expecting them to come back in to have me sign paperwork or something like that -- but I looked out the window about five minutes later and they were gone -- they had vanished. So, uh, I guess we were done? I thought I'd have to sign off on something like I did with the furnace, but apparently not, and I was left downstairs with the cats and a rapidly-cooling house.

I let Daisy know they were done, the system was running and working, and then unhooked the portable AC unit upstairs in the bedroom we'd been using to stay cool at night so that I could go back downstairs and focus on the incoming weather.

By around 3 or so we had our first thunder and rain -- hard rain, with a little hail. Not bad hail, just barely pea-sized. Some of the thunder was loud enough to rattle the windows and doors, but I wouldn't call it severe by any stretch of the imagination, just a normal spring thunderstorm. It was short-lived and moved off quickly.

When you live in the midwest in the spring, local weather coverage for severe events pre-empting normal programming on network TV for a few hours at a time, commercial-free, is not anything new. To an extent, it's kind of exciting, especially when they have live cameras stationed around the city and reporters driving around through it giving real-time live-feed coverage of certain parts of the area. When I lived in the Kansas City area many years ago, I wasn't anywhere near as anxious or as focused on the weather as I am now; it didn't concern me because while I'd been through some nasty storms at that point (including storms while I lived there), none of them had caused damage to anything I'd been around or inside of. Of course, at that time, I also didn't have any property to damage -- I didn't own a vehicle, I didn't own a home, I was just there. So yes, bad storms -- pretty godawful ones at times -- would roll through, and I didn't really pay them much mind. 

When I moved to Kansas and lived there, I began to pay a little closer attention -- I was in my own rented house at that point and I did own a car, and Kansas should be called "the tornado state" given its association with how many roll through there every year. That is when I started paying closer attention to tornado forecasts and potential outbreaks, as well as other severe hazards. Yet, the entire time I lived in Kansas -- five years, from 2009 to 2014 -- I think the closest any tornado got to me was maybe 15-20 miles away? Something like that. I used to say 30 miles away but as I've gotten older I realize how close some of those little towns that got hit were to where I lived at the time. Newton would get torn up here and there while I lived there with severe thunderstorms and softball-sized hail -- still the largest hail I've ever seen in person -- but no actual tornadoes struck that little flat town in the time I lived there, and I can only remember the tornado siren going off a handful of times during my tenure there.

Even when I moved to Omaha in 2014 -- during one of the more active stretches of severe weather I've seen, from 2014 to about 2017 or so -- I wasn't incredibly concerned with the weather and both of us lived in an apartment complex and parked outside with no cover during those years. I was in an apartment, my car (and later, the truck) was beat to shit and 20 years old even then, and I remained mostly unbothered. I remember the few days after our wedding, I was sitting on the parents' back porch smoking and watching the storms roll in, and went inside and asked "it's probably a bad thing when the storm clouds right above us start rotating pretty strongly, isn't it?"

No, what really ramped up my storm anxiety was when we lost the retaining wall in 2019, and then in 2021 lost both of our giant silver maple trees in the front yard in separate storms, then in 2024 when 80mph winds ripped part of the cowling off our garage and took out power for multiple days. Now I am terrified of severe weather, because apparently we're just one bad storm away from needing to spend thousands of dollars we don't have on repairs and cleanup. It's no longer a novelty for me; I've paid far too much money I couldn't afford to spend on bullshit storm damage just because Nebraska weather wants to be an asshole sometimes. 

So, I sat there in our freshly-air-conditioned living room and watched the storm coverage with a morbid curiosity. Even by the time the HVAC guys left, I knew it wasn't going to be a major event for us, just by the way the storms were tracking even then, but I do have a scientific fascination with weather and the forecasting of weather, so I languidly watched the reporting as different storms rolled over different parts of the area. The first round had rolled through shortly after 3, and the second rolled through around 3:45 with a bit more heavy rain and thunder, and then...it was gone. The local weather said as of 4:10 the severe weather had finished for us and they were resuming normal programming, and as soon as they said that I gathered my stuff, turned off the TV, and went back upstairs.

So the vast majority of the severe weather missed us yet again. Yes, there were a few minor tornadoes around the area, 50 miles away or more, but nothing close to us and I don't think anything above a EF-2. I could be wrong there though as I didn't pay much attention to it after the fact. I was just glad that my stressors for the day had ceased, I had air conditioning again, and I still had two more days of my "weekend" with which I could decompress. 

In the evening, after Daisy got off work and we had dinner, it had finally cooled down enough to where we could ease off the AC and turn it "up" so it wouldn't run constantly. I did so, and the system wound down and shut down as per it was supposed to...and the furnace fan kept running.

Hm. That's interesting.

I waited twenty minutes, the fan kept running. I turned off the system completely. The fan kept running.

Hm. That's not good, that's not right. 

Now, we had this happen a while back a couple of times, with the old furnace and the old air conditioner. Those times, a relay had blown or the system had needed a hard reset. So, I performed the hard reset on the new system -- that means turning off the breaker, waiting a bit, and then turning it back on. I did that, and...in five seconds, the fan kicked back on and was blowing again. Sigh.

I tested it once more, using the actual AC. The AC would kick on, run its cycle until the house was cool enough, and then the thermostat would turn it off and the fan....kept going. Again. We didn't need the AC that night -- it was getting down into the 40s after the storms and the cold front blew through -- so I just left it off at the breaker and left the system off. I told Daisy she would need to call again in the morning to have the guys come back out and fix whatever was wrong with it.

Friday morning rolled around, Daisy called, and the original tech who came to examine our system came back out to the house. He messed around with it a bit, did some troubleshooting, and found that upon installation, the dip switches (whatever those are) weren't set correctly. He set those, tested a few more things, and essentially performed a hard reboot of the system, and the problem was fixed. Our AC has worked normally since, and has kicked on and off normally when we need it to run. He did, however, tell me two things I didn't know:

1. Whether it's on heat or cool, depending on the season, always leave the system on. As in, with these new systems, they don't need to be turned off unless absolutely necessary. Leaving them on reduces wear on the components, etc. If they don't need to run all the time, set them to temperatures where they won't need to and adjust as necessary. 

2. Some people hate it and don't want to do it, but it's recommended (by whom, I don't know) that the house fan on the furnace is just left on at all times. That more evenly circulates the air in the house and keeps the components of the HVAC system from being overworked.

...I don't think that last one is accurate. Seems to me that if the fan were running constantly, it would wear out and blow out the fan motor much more quickly than normal use. Add to that we'd likely need to change the very expensive (like, $40 each) filters every month or so instead of once every eight or nine months because they'd be constantly pulling in dust, dander from the cats, and dirt from the air. So, no, we're not doing that. I also don't want a part of my house to be constantly on, nor do I want constant airflow from the vents at all times.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is a new thing that's really true and really recommended, but I somehow doubt that. 

So, anyway, it's all done. Life has returned to normal within our household, even if it feels like "normal" equates to "waiting for the next big appliance to decide it no longer wants to work."

April Showers, Part VI: The Nightmare Scenario

 The new AC unit was $5500. It was paid for via credit card and we are now that much more into debt.

It could not be avoided. It's stupid to sink almost $3k into repairs of a 50-year-old unit that may die a week later, or may live another year or two before the next major repair or replacement is needed, so we opted for the replacement and for an upgraded two-phase unit for the house that will run normally during somewhat milder temperatures and will kick into mega cold when it's like 90-100 outside. 

It has not yet been installed. It was paid for last night and the parts were ordered. Our HVAC guys said it could be put in rather quickly -- as in, it could be installed this week, likely.

"That's going to be interesting," I told Daisy. "It's Tuesday night, we're expecting near-certain severe weather on Thursday, and I'm sure there's more than a 24 hour turnaround for this stuff. So that leaves...Friday? I guess if they're doing it this week that would be the best day anyhow since we're both off and I don't have to be asleep all day."

If it's not done by Friday, it would be until at least Monday. These guys don't work weekends. Seems to me that they're missing out on an extra two days of revenue stream there, but whatever, I don't make their rules. 

I texted Daisy this morning before I went to sleep that with the terrible weather possible tomorrow, if they called to set up the appointment, set it for Friday and not tomorrow -- I have to sleep at some point and she shouldn't have to take off any more work than necessary, and the last thing I want to do is for the technicians to race the clock on this:

So of course they call, say "tomorrow," and Daisy says "yes."

I am so incredibly mad and frustrated. 

"Call back and tell them Friday," I said. "Full stop. I can't go 27 hours without sleep again like I did for the furnace installation -- I just can't. I also can't do that only to crash out just as the worst weather of the season and possible tornadoes are getting ready to hit us."

She called back. Friday appointments are full. It's either tomorrow morning or some nebulous timeframe of "next week" that we wouldn't have a date for or any real control of at the moment. 

It is somewhere around this point where I began to break and lose my mind a little.

Look, the past few weeks have not been great. Work has been fucking awful, I can rarely now get more than 4 hours of sleep at any given time (it used to be six, and boy do I wish I could still sleep six hours straight without interruption; that sounds like a dream) and both of us have been constantly running. The AC blowing out and putting us further in the hole financially and the debacle with Daisy's windshield isn't helping matters much, nor is the cost of gas, groceries, vet appointments, and everything else skyrocketing over the course of the past month. Add Daisy's almost two-week sickness that started in NC to that, and basically, everything's been pretty shitty ever since we returned from my parents and has steadily gotten worse day by day. I am hot and sweaty as well as really sleep-deprived and angry at the world, and I've just been told that everything I did not want to happen tomorrow is, in fact, happening tomorrow whether I want it to or not.

The technicians are supposed to be here tomorrow between 8am and 10am. 

"They said the guy has one appointment before us," Daisy said.

"...so that means they'll be here at 10am or after," I said, sighing and rubbing my temples.

The removal of the old AC unit and installation of the new one will take, approximately, 5-6 hours. If they get here at 10, that would mean they'd be here until around 4. If they get here at 8 on the dot -- which will not happen -- they'd be done by 1 or 2. 

Storm chances increase the further into the afternoon hours we go. It's possible that they could start firing up before 3pm or it's possible they could wait until 5-6. The main threat window is apparently 4pm to 10pm "with all hazards possible" before the storms quickly exit the area. Tomorrow is the highest threat of tornadoes, wind damage and large hail that we've had predicted for the better part of a year, localized to our area more specifically than some of the surrounding areas. The local weather folks I follow think it's going to happen sooner rather than later, and have all threats move outside of the area and be done by 8pm. 

None of this fills me with any sort of hope. This makes the entire day tomorrow essentially be a game of "race the clock" for these guys, which is exactly what I did not want. Weather aside, when I pay $5500 for an appliance, I want it installed carefully and with precision, with every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed. I don't want HVAC guys scrambling to do it before tornadoes strike because they don't want to postpone it or get caught in awful weather while trying to finish and have to stop halfway through. 

I also don't want them to get it done, thank them, have them leave and for it to run for an hour or two of sweet new AC bliss only to have the power get taken out by the storms, or for violent storms to roll through and damage the house or the new, freshly-installed AC unit. I have less control over that, of course. 

I know a lot of this is anxiety talking, too. I know how I get when I'm stressed and sleep deprived and awful weather is predicted. I also know that I can't control it and can't change it, so it's a big shit sandwich I have to take multiple bites of. I can already see anxiety robbing me of a third of my weekend, robbing me of sleep and relaxation time and downtime, and it really can't be avoided. 

People without anxiety do not understand the concept of it; it's like it's a foreign entity to them. Their knee-jerk response is along the lines of "why stress about something you can't change or control?"

They don't realize the other side of that coin is "oh, so only be stressed about things I can change or control? If I can change or control it, why would I be stressed about it?" If you can fix a problem, it's not a problem. If you can fix a problem and choose not to because you'd rather suffer and be anxious, that is stupid, and that's on you. 

I've talked about this here before.

The second knee-jerk reaction is "if you can't change your situation, change your perspective," which generally makes me want to punch the person who says it before the sentence is out of their mouth. But, for the sake of argument, let's follow this logic for a moment and do a "perspective change."

Okay, perspective changed. Nothing else has changed but inside your mind. Changing your perspective does not stop the storms and possible tornadoes. It does not stop the sleep loss and necessary time spent to take care of the AC; both of those things will have physical effects and take a physical toll both internally and externally no matter my perspective on it or how I personally feel about it. 

So what does any of that help, exactly? "Change your perspective" is disrespectful to the person suffering from anxiety about anything; it's essentially saying "suck it up and get over it" because it does nothing to solve the problem. Therapy and medications wouldn't remove the tornadoes or change time frames or the like either, so get outta my face with that horseshit too. 

Anyway, I'm getting off track.

Daisy is taking the morning off tomorrow so that I can get some sleep; she will make up the time on Friday morning (when she would normally not be working). The working plan is that she'll handle the guys when they get here and make sure the cats are secure and not in the way, and when I wake up it'll be like "halftime, switch sides" and I'll monitor the rest of the work through completion. This also means I'll be at least somewhat rested to handle whatever's necessary as well as be alert to monitor whatever storms are coming in, as Daisy still works until 5:30 -- well into the window of when these storms should be hitting, if they actually come for us. 

Again, we've had some forecasts for nasty weather multiple times over March and April already, and we got nothing or next to nothing as the storms formed up either south of us or east of us. I really hope that will be the case tomorrow as well, but in the back of my mind I'm also like well, we're due now, since we haven't gotten anything yet this year. 

Yes, I understand that's like standing in front of a slot machine at a casino and being like "well, I'm due now because I haven't hit the jackpot in 5000 spins, so this machine has to be ready to pay out to me" and yeah, that's not how chance works, it's random and fickle and why gamblers usually lose all their money and end up betting their homes and cars and losing them too. 

More than anything, I'm just tired. I just want to wave my hand like it's a magic wand and have all this shit be done so I no longer have to stress about it. 

I keep telling myself that a 2 is essentially "meh" on the scale here, and there have been times where we've been a 3 or 4 and we haven't gotten more than a normal, quiet thunderstorm and some rain, if that -- but there are also times we've been under a 1 or 2 and all hell has been unleashed. So, it is what it is. 

In my head I'm also like look, if the storms are gonna hit and do their worst, just end me or do nothing -- either kill me so I don't have to worry about it or completely bypass us and do nothing, but don't just damage the house or the roof or other parts of our property to where it's something that will stress us out more and cost us more money to fix, because I will wish at that point that I had been killed rather than have to deal with it. 

An extreme viewpoint? Maybe. I am so sick of "dealing with it" for everything these days. I'm in my forties and wanted to be done dealing with shit by now. I'm rapidly losing the ability to not have a complete mental breakdown/meltdown over things these days, and that mental barrier I have is getting thinner by the week. 

So, I'll let you know what happens, I guess. It's about all I can do. 

April Showers, Part V: As Predicted

 As predicted, the AC has died.

I awoke Friday morning around 2, to feeling it blowing/moving no air whatsoever, and I went downstairs and turned it off. It took a few minutes for the system to shut down, but it did finally turn off. I was sure it was out of refrigerant, as even Thursday afternoon and evening I didn't think it was blowing that much cool air. 

Luckily, the weekend was much cooler than normal and we were perfectly comfortable. The past two nights we've had the furnace running, even, since it's been so chilly.

Our HVAC company came this morning to take a look. After much discussion, we're likely going to go with a new unit and bite the financial bullet on it. Our home warranty will cover some of the repairs to it, were we to choose repairs -- a new coil and refrigerant refill, and not even all of that -- but it's a 50-year old unit and the home warranty will not cover a replacement, despite an AC being part of what we have a home warranty for...similar to our furnace. No, this will be all on us, just like the furnace was. 

Both of us are very bitter about that. While the home warranty has saved us a lot of money on a lot of things over the years, stuff like the furnace and AC, which were supposed to be covered under it, were the main reasons we keep renewing it every year. To have neither of those covered and to have both of them fail in the span of four months is really frustrating and disheartening. It's supposed to be 85 degrees tomorrow and we have no AC to help mitigate that. Daisy will likely need to set up the portable AC we have just to make the upstairs of the house bearable while we wait for the plans for the new unit to be installed.

Yes, that's a thing. The HVAC folks are getting back to us either tonight or early tomorrow morning with a few options and cost breakdowns. We were told that were we to just get it repaired, refilled with refrigerant, and left as-is, it would be something like $2800 all inclusive. To get an entirely new baseline unit without any special bells and whistles (it's not like we have a giant mansion or anything, this is a small two-story house) that would suit our needs, it would only be about $1k more. Costs go up from there for the higher-end models, of course. If I were confident that a major part wouldn't blow on the old unit again I might have been tempted for the repair and refill of coolant, were it a lot cheaper. But it's not, and if we can get a new unit installed and set up for a bit more, then all the better. So that's the option we'll be going with -- one of the new units of some sort. The tech said even the low-end models would be a major upgrade to what we have now, so that sounds promising at least.

So...once they get back to us, we'll pick our option and will go forth with everything as possible. Our HVAC tech was confident they could get someone out this week at some point to do it. The problem is that I do still have to sleep, and have to be able to sleep during the day every day -- that can't be avoided and I certainly just can't be like "well, guess I don't sleep today before I work my eleven-hour overnight shift." While the AC unit is, of course, outside, it's not like them ripping out the old one and putting on a new one will be fast or quiet, and I believe they still need to change out a coil on the inside of the house too, in the furnace closet. Daisy has the option to take VTO -- voluntary time off -- unpaid time, and she may end up doing that just so she can supervise and so I can try to sleep. 

Sleep today is a wash; I was awakened around 11-something when the HVAC guy arrived and was not able to get back to sleep since. So, I have a grand total of about 2.5 hours of sleep in me for the day, and I just have to suck it up and deal with it tonight as I work.

This is not the only stress we've had to deal with over the past few days, by the way.

I mentioned earlier that Daisy had a rock fly up and hit her car windshield, sending a big wide crack slowly creeping across it -- and that we had an appointment to have the windshield replacement people come out to put a new one in for us, right in the driveway.

Well...

When said people arrived early on Friday morning, they examined the car and weren't sure they would be able to replace said windshield. Why? Because there is a lot of surface rust on our nearly 20-year-old car, especially at the edge of the roof where the windshield meets the roof, and if that rust had penetrated deep enough, it means the windshield is unsafe and while he could take out the old one, he could not install a new one. 

That's right, y'all -- we were told that a dime-sized rock that cracked our windshield could essentially total out our car. If a new windshield couldn't be put in it after the old one was removed, the car would be useless and we'd have to sell it for scrap, because (obviously) you can't have a car without a windshield. 

So imagine this scenario -- you haven't slept much, the AC in your house has died, and at 7:45 in the morning there's a glass technician in your driveway telling you that you may need a new goddamn car because a pane of glass in it may be irreplaceable -- and, of course, you also have about five important errands to run that day where, ahem, a windshield is goddamned necessary.

Luckily, the rust was cosmetic only. The glass technician was able to grind it off and seal it (I'm guessing with Rust-oleum or something similar) and he put the new windshield on without issue. So, that's one crisis averted, at least. Had we been forced to essentially go get a new car I am sure I would've lost about 30% of the hair I have left due to stress. 

"You watch," I told Daisy, "the first time we take it out after it's been fixed, another rock will fly up and break it again."

This has, thankfully, not happened.

Anyway.

The great purge of 2026 has completed. This afternoon, I finally finished sorting everything and putting it all away in its new places (might as well do something if I can't sleep) and wrapped up the last three bags for one final run to Goodwill. In the end, I believe there were 11 or 12 total full 30-gallon Glad bags of donation clothes that I filled, and I cut my wardrobe roughly in half. There are legit hundreds of hangers scattered around the closet, some of which I will still use and some of which will likely be donated or recycled with everything else. 

Through all of it, I looked back on the person I once was compared to the person I am now. So many pairs of shoes and flip-flops were donated, some I'd only worn once or twice and some I had never worn once, still with tags on them. Some of the shoes, especially the unworn ones, were essentially fossilized -- canvas shoes that had become hard as a rock just sitting in storage. I was sort of stunned at that. No, I'd not worn them before, and the ones I had I hadn't touched in ten years or more -- but they felt like they'd turned to stone. I'm sure they could be reworked and softened up again, and I'm sure they'll get a decent home with someone, but that was fascinating to me.

I found two giant packs of tank top undershirts, unopened and unworn. I vaguely remember getting them off Amazon when they were on a deep discount sale many years ago, citing at the time that I'd never not have a use for them, as they're the one item of my wardrobe that wears out faster than any other -- but for the life of me I have no idea how long ago that was. The fact that they've sat there stuffed into a corner, still in their plastic packaging shows what a hoarder of clothing I really was.

Not to be outdone, I found an unopened pack of black thermal (long john) undershirts and an entire unopened 12-pack of the Dickies socks I like as well. I don't remember buying either of those either, honestly. I know I did at some point, but I absolutely do not remember it. 

No, I'm not donating any of those, by the way -- I will, eventually, get to them. They were socked away (no pun intended) into the storage tubs with all of my winter clothing, which has now been swapped out for summer shirts in the closet. 

As I was going through a lot of my stuff I remembered the person I was when I procured a lot of it, and pondered on how much I have changed since those times. I got rid of some stuff I've had for well over a decade -- not just the shoes but pants, shorts, hoodies, t-shirts. Especially t-shirts. I could not tell you who the man was that purchased all of those things, because he doesn't exist anymore. He existed once, he wanted those things once, and now...he doesn't.

I remember in grad school, easily 15 years ago now, how one of my colleagues said that once you turn 30, it's time to get rid of the band shirts and the comic book t-shirts and cargo shorts, the flip flops and hoodies, and by age 30 how you needed to look more put together and adult. This man, at the time, was I think older than I am now -- he was the oldest member of our graduate studies program and the only one who was on the nonfiction track -- he wanted to be a travel writer, a nature writer. I think I've mentioned this story here before.

While he was a genuinely nice guy, I disagreed with him then and I disagree with that sentiment now. You're going to get older no matter what; how much you choose to "grow up" as you age is entirely up to you. My dad will turn 76 this year and has an incredible comic book and music collection, as well as a large cache of nerdy t-shirts he actually wears. Daisy's father is 78 and almost every time I see him, he's wearing some tie-dyed clothing that he's either acquired over the years or that I've personally made for him. Our mothers, both mine and Daisy's, love the tie-dyes I've made them and wear them all the time. Daisy's mother is older than mine by a considerable degree, and she has purple hair right now, as well as a giant Grateful Dead record collection that I digitized for her last year. 

You do you, I say, to one and all. Every year I get more music t-shirts that I adore, on purpose, and wear with pride -- the latest have been the Tragically Hip shirts I've collected over the past year or so, but some others I've acquired recently are shirts displaying Kiss, Ghost, Nirvana, The Traveling Wilburys, Gordon Lightfoot, AC/DC, Poison, Motley Crue, Willie Nelson, The Smiths, and The Beatles -- just to name a few I remember off the top of my head. 

Every year now my hair is at least three or four different colors depending on the month and its length. 

Every year now I tend to gravitate more towards comfort than fashion. I think I've worn jeans maybe twice over the course of the past year or so -- it's been sweats all other times.

Every year now I care a little less about what I'm supposed to be looking like or dressing like or the attitude or demeanor I "should" be exhibiting for someone my age. 

What's important to me is that I have what I need, I am what I need to be, and I am happy. 

As the days pass, I'm looking more and more forward to getting to Canada for a week. Yes, I know it's expensive. Yes, I know that travel -- especially international travel -- is long and arduous and takes so very much energy out of me, out of all of us really. But I have fantasies about being in a bed in a basement in a house in another country and knowing that I have zero things to do at that moment aside from play on my phone, read a book, or watch something on my Kindle -- that I am free to eat and sleep and just sink into my environment without having someone else's schedule or responsibilities forced upon me. Five full days of family, togetherness with Daisy, and peace. Days where the rest of the world stops, days where my job will find me inaccessible and out of the country, days where I will sometimes eat authentic Canadian poutine and drink Tim Hortons coffee in the span of only a few hours between them. 

Elon Musk says he wants to be the first person to die on Mars; I want to die in Canada. There's a difference.

Not this trip, of course, but when it's actually time for me to kick off this planet, I want it to be up there. I feel more home there than I've felt anywhere, anywhere, in my life. I can't tell you why. I don't know why. I certainly don't have any ancestry (that I know of) from Canada. But, it has a pull on me. It calls to me again and again, and has always called to me more with each visit. Sometimes when I dream, I dream that we're driving those familiar roads around the family homestead and up on Cape Breton Island. I've memorized every turn, every view. I know what the air there smells like, what it feels like. I long for the misting rain on my skin and for the low rumbles of thunder as a storm sweeps over the sea-facing hills. Nova Scotia is the only place I feel I have ever truly belonged. 

It also seems like we may be getting a taste of similar weather on Thursday. We've been told by the weather people that Thursday has, at present time, the best chances all season so far for severe weather in the Omaha area.

Now, I take all of this with a grain of salt. We've had severe storm chances multiple times this season already, sometimes significant ones, and it has all gone south and east of us every time so far. But, this is Omaha in April, and in April anything goes for weather here. We've had some of our worst storms and tornado scares in April, pretty consistently, since I've been living up here. So far this year we have been really lucky, but I'll remind you that almost exactly two years ago this week, there was the tornado outbreak that tore up a good chunk of this town, especially north and west of us, that was bad enough to where cleanup crews worked for a few weeks to get all the debris and tree limbs taken care of and to get power restored for those people in the area that got hit hard. 

So, we'll see I guess. 

Canada Prep 2026, Part I: Semi-Locals

 I am about, ehhhh...60% packed for Canada.

Now, mind you, we don't leave for over two months. That's a long time, all. So much will be different in the next two months. 

I generally pack for most possible eventualities when going to Canada, though this time around I'm trying to be a little more frugal and conservative in my packing. I don't like to travel heavy when I go up there, especially when we have access to laundry and a fridge and it's summer. I say this because inevitably I will find some new clothing whether I'm looking for it or not, I will be able to remain entertained and have food I want and can eat and I will be comfortable without issue, so my needs are light. I also do not expect to be vaping anymore by that time, so I won't have to worry about packing vapes. 

As for weather, ehhhh, all bets are off generally. June can be iffy and/or volatile both here and in Canada. I've been up there in June when it's been 50s-60s and rainy every day, and I've been there in June when it's been in the 90s and unbearable (the family homestead does not have air conditioning). I packed my thin and light Columbia rain jacket, originally purchased for last year's trip up there but never used, and I may or may not pack a hoodie and/or a pair of actual shoes. To be fair, if I need a hoodie or actual shoes, the Walmart in Port Hawkesbury, ten minutes from the family homestead, will readily sell me either of those items at a very reasonable price, so we'll see and perhaps play it by ear. 

I also have to keep in mind that I know who I am as a person, and I will need to reserve space in my luggage for as many bags of ketchup chips and Canadian candy bars that I can cram in to carry home. 

Don't look at me like that. Again, I know who I am as a person. 

There is a set Canada-centric wardrobe I tend to wear when I'm up there, and it is very mindfully chosen. As I mentioned last year, the last thing I want to do is stick out as a very obvious American, and that mindset is absolutely even more in play this year than it was last year. I also walk a fine line in trying not to look like a tourist, too. We will be up there during "tourism season" for the first time in a couple of years. Now, mind you, I am and am not a tourist at the same time -- we have family there, and at this point it's not like we're looking around at all the sights and sounds, oohing-and-aahing at everything. We're not locals, but we're semi-locals at the very least, anchored there by the family. 

At the same time, I also have a torrid love affair with Atlantic Canada and all of its mystical, non-American wonders -- its foods, its Tim Hortons, its culture -- but I am much more silently awed now, and I just embrace it like a warm hug from an old friend. 

Anyway, I'm getting off track. Yes, I have a Canada-specific wardrobe. Generally it's clothing that is unassuming and nondescript, clothing that looks like it would befit the people of the area. Plain shirts and plain shorts/pants where applicable, etc. A hoodie either with no logo on it or a workwear logo from a company like Bass Pro Shops or Carhartt (I have neither of these, so my Columbia hoodies had to do last year). However, because I am who I am, I will always toss some flair in there -- this year that flair comes in the form of a couple Tragically Hip t-shirts and my red-and-white maple leaf swim trunks. I don't even know that I'll use the swim trunks while we're there, but as it'll be June and we're never far from a beach, I'm all for it. 

Most of the time, my goal is to not draw any more attention to myself than I have to. In a few years, when our country's relationship with Canada is hopefully in a much better place than it is now, I'll likely loosen up a bit and feel more comfortable there in my normal clothing (tie-dyes, baggy board shorts, etc) like I used to do in the old days when I wasn't necessarily concerned about being singled out as American. Until then, though, I try to make myself blend in and look as Canadian as possible. Around the homestead it's not necessarily a problem -- but if we leave the immediate area I have to double-down on looking nondescript and camouflage myself into looking like a local. Sometimes it's harder to do than you think. 

In preparation for Canada, as this is the whole point of me writing here at the moment, we have tried to take care of everything we can beforehand -- the pressing, important stuff, anyway. For example, making sure we have travel insurance (especially for Mama) and making sure that we have wheelchair assistance for her. Wheelchair assistance is needed for her because she can't exactly sprint between terminals, and traveling takes a lot out of her -- but also, it's a huge benefit for us because it means we board first (priority boarding, etc). 

As an aside, on at least one of the flights, apparently I'm seated in the back row of the airplane. Like, the very last seat in the back. I...actually kind of like that idea, to be honest with you. It means I don't have anyone behind me and I'm guessing there's at least a little more room to stretch out and relax. I don't remember which flight it is, though. Truthfully it doesn't really matter. I think it's the final flight home into Omaha when we return, but maybe I'm wrong. 

The Catsitter has blocked off the needed time for us for the trip, so we've already got her ready to roll. We will of course have to pay her and prepare for that, but we have time.

We have scheduled our next doctors' appointments for about a week and a half before we leave. That will give enough time to see whether my doctor wants to increase my dosage of Mounjaro or adjust anything else, and then get another refill of it accordingly. 

We have scheduled our AC tuneup for early June, which was the earliest available date -- but I am sure our AC will not last until then as it was running out of refrigerant last summer when we had the last tuneup done. So we will likely have to change that up somewhere, somehow, or have the guys come out to pump some refrigerant into our system to limp it along until our scheduled tuneup where we plan to assess the cost of a brand new unit. It's an inevitability anyhow, eventually. We know almost for a fact that the AC is going to die this summer, and my money is on that it will die sooner rather than later, especially if we keep having 85+ degree days in goddamn April. 

Mind you, when I say "die," I don't mean it'll die in the sense that it blows a major part again -- all of those parts have been replaced piecemeal over the past few years -- I mean it'll run dry on refrigerant and will freeze up/won't work anymore until it gets more or until we get an entirely new unit. I know we are eventually going to get a new unit, very likely this summer, as the old one is from 1976 -- but there is a massive cost factor there. So, we have to plan for that as possible, and it is what it is.

April Showers, Part IV: The Spring of Transformation

 

So, I guess we're still poor. 

We also didn't hit the Powerball last night either, just so y'all know. Yes, both Daisy and I will be returning to work today. 

Yesterday, I took three giant bags of clothing, other odds and ends, and all of my old glasses to Goodwill. In the overnight hours, I filled two more before Daisy went to bed for the night, and began on a third in my office with some clothing I'd pulled out of storage to sort through and wash. 

There's a large part of this that feels freeing to me. I'm shedding a lot of old possessions, and I am clearing space in my closet. That makes me feel good. Having gone through the Goodwill shortly after dropping the stuff off (Daisy and I like to give the thrift stores around town a good once-over from time to time), I saw almost nothing on the racks in big-guy sizes. That either means as soon as stuff is put out on the racks, it's snatched up...or nobody as large as I am -- and I'm not that large anymore -- ever donates anything to that particular Goodwill store.

Look, I am quite aware of the Goodwill Corporation and their numerous flaws. If there were a DAV Thrift Store here in town, I'd be donating everything to them. I haven't seen a Salvation Army store in years either. I have a lot more problems with them anyway. But seeing as those places aren't around, Goodwill is the closest and easiest option for donations. They just are, I'm not going to pretend they're not any more than I'm going to pretend that they're not a completely for-profit corporation with a lot of problems. But here's the thing...if they put my stuff out on the racks and sell it cheaply to people who need it far more than I ever needed it, well, I can be at peace with that. Knowing that just one person who really wanted some shorts that fit them, or some t-shirts with funny things on them, or some new barely-worn socks would be able to get them? I can live with that, that will put me more at peace than so many other things would. This is a shitty world and I want to be part of a solution, not part of a larger problem. 

So I guess what I'm saying is that if you're a fat guy in the Omaha area and you hit up the midtown Goodwill off Dodge, you've got a good shot at getting some good clothing over the next few weeks or months, especially if you're a nerd. 

I expect to make five or six total trips there to drop off donations over the course of the next few months -- each drop-off being 3-4 big bags of clothing. I'd like to clean out the household stuff too, like all of the old coffee mugs and stuff like that I don't need or no longer use, plus old kitchen appliances and other odds and ends. We started doing that about a year ago and got derailed by other things. So I'd like to eventually finish that. Daisy is (slowly) cleaning out her side of the closet too and occasionally adds to the giveaway bags. 

There are so many hard choices to make with my own things. I have nostalgic memories attached to a lot of my older clothing, despite very much trying to not be that type of person throughout my life. It is what it is, though, and can't really be helped. At the same time, there's 20x the amount of clothing and items around the house that I thought I would want forever and found that to absolutely not be the case. It's a deep cleaning, a purge of about 60-70% of my clothing and items because I will never know what's "essential" until I remove all that is non-essential.

And, to be fair, I am having some issues even remembering what I had. I pulled pants and shorts out of the closet that I have absolutely zero recollection of purchasing, owning, or ever wearing. I'm sure I did, I'm sure I've worn these things, but holy hell, is my memory really that bad? I used to be able to pinpoint every piece of clothing I owned -- I could point it out and tell you where I got it, state/city/year/store. I used to take some level of strange personal pride in that. I cannot say that anymore for a lot of my stuff, at least not for certain. Part of that is that the vast majority of clothing I have purchased within the last 5-10 years has been bought online, but a larger part of it is that I've amassed so much that I stopped caring and stopped remembering. 

When it gets to that point, it's time for a purge. A big one. It's time to make this a spring of transformation for me and my wardrobe.

I told Daisy that my goal in this project was to get my wardrobe down to about half or less of what it is now. There's still going to be seasonal stuff to swap out here and there, of course -- hoodies for summer overshirts and Hawaiian shirts and vice versa when the seasons change -- but by and large I want to make sure the stuff I'm keeping is because I need it or have a tight connection to it, and yeah...a lot of stuff in the closet now just isn't that.

I can only do this work in spurts -- a few hours here and there before I run out of energy and just don't have the time, patience, or wherewithal to keep going on any given day. Doing this sorting, cleaning, laundry, bagging of clothing and items, etc. -- it is a time and energy vampire. Sorting and laundering everything is draining and takes forever, and most of the time I don't have a whole lot of spare time and energy in general to focus on it. When I do, it's usually at the expense of something else. 

On the plus side, it allows me to plan and pack for Canada a lot better. That plane goes wheels up in two months and you bet your ass I will be prepared for it. I don't need a lot; staying at the homestead means we have access to laundry 

April Showers, Part III: New Visions

 I've now reached official middle-age in so many respects. I no longer like to drive, I no longer like leaving the house, I've come to detest grocery shopping (in person/in-store; ordering grocery delivery is fine), I no longer think thunderstorms are fun or exciting, my hair is rapidly graying, and I now officially have a glasses prescription that is so strong, and so necessary, that I can't really function without having my glasses on. 

I have become old. 

The glasses I ordered from my normal glasses website, with my new prescription, arrived earlier this week as expected. The new prescription, while accurate, is...strong. It has taken me several days to get really used to it, and I'm not completely sure I'm all the way there. I know there's an adjustment period for all new prescriptions, and I've had some pretty long or rough adjustment periods before when I get my prescriptions updated, but this time around it seems especially difficult. I am not sure why. I guess it was just enough of a change to throw my perceptions completely out of whack. I don't know if it's just because I'm getting older and my eyes are aging, or if it's allergies affecting my eyes (allergies have been really rough the past two weeks or so, because April) or a combination of the two. 

The glasses I ordered from the actual eye doctor, and were covered by my insurance, still have not arrived there -- if they had, I would've gotten a phone call or an email saying they were ready for pickup. Unless I get a phone call from them this morning, this now pushes out the time we'd be able to go pick them up to at least next Friday at the earliest, as both of us are working or sleeping all other hours of the day that the optometrist's office is open.

Yesterday, a rock flew up and hit the windshield of our car while Daisy was out running errands. It started a large crack across the bottom of the passenger side that is slowly widening and making its way across the entire windshield. How do we know it was a rock? Oh, we found it on the base of the hood, where the wiper blades sit. It's about the size of a small marble. The entire windshield will have to be replaced, and on Friday morning, the Safelite Glass guys are coming out to the house to do that. It's covered completely by our insurance, so we don't have to pay anything for it, but still.

I don't know if this is the first time this has happened with Daisy's car or if it's happened before. The full windshield replacement, I mean. I know it happened to other cars in the family -- it's happened to my mother at least once or twice and I believe it happened to one of my exes' cars as well, but my memory is really hazy in my old age now. If a major event doesn't become a crisis and gets resolved quickly, I don't tend to remember it at all. 

I've actually been concerned about my memory in recent months. I can't seem to remember almost anything anymore. Daisy and I will have full conversations about important things or events and later I will have zero recollection of them. One of my bosses at work will give me a directive or inform me of a new policy and I will completely forget about it unless someone brings it up later. I will be doing laundry, take clothes out of the washer, put them in the dryer, and shut the door and walk away without ever turning on the dryer. 

I don't know if there's something wrong with me -- if I have a condition of some sort or I'm beginning a cognitive decline, or if I'm just getting old. I also don't know if it's compounded stress and lack of sleep that's making me forgetful or putting me into a subconscious state of "I don't give a shit" or what. I have been so very tired all the time as of late, to the point where my body physically will not allow me to stay awake sometimes even if I desperately want to, no matter how much caffeine I've had. That's really concerning as well.

I'm becoming desensitized or otherwise frustrated by and to so many things that previously were not triggers for me, or were triggers but no longer are. I no longer care about so many things. If Daisy is mad at me about something, it doesn't affect me like it used to. If bad storms are coming, I don't generally get as panicked and anxious as I used to. I've found myself caring so much less about my job when I'm at work, and am just going through the motions and doing the bare minimum because I have to in order to keep getting paid. I've become so very frustrated and bored with the food in the house to where it gets to the point where I don't even want to eat anything, because it'll just be the same things I ate before.

Like, what is it? Do I have a brain tumor, or something? If I do, can it just end me so I don't have to pay back my credit cards and student loans? 

I realize a lot of these are symptoms of depression. I don't feel depressed or hopeless at all. Believe me, I know when I'm entering a depressive cycle, and this isn't it. I haven't had a depressive cycle in several years now. I don't know what else to attribute it to, though. 

Case in point, there are storms coming today, and decent chances of some severe weather almost every day for the next week -- because this is Nebraska in April, and there's always the chance you're gonna die when you live in the midwest in April (I wrote a poem about this once, about fifteen years ago now). Normally a multi-day severe weather threat would have me so anxious I couldn't function. Now? Psh. Make sure the car is in the garage before it hits so that if we get hail, we don't have to replace all of the other windows and the windshield. If a tornado is going to take out the house, take out the whole thing and don't half-ass it -- I want the insurance payout to be enough to where we can move to Canada. 

Do you understand how irregular that is for me? Because I can see it objectively. 

Anyway.

This morning, the Double Trouble Boys™ have their yearly vet checkups and shots. We just scheduled them together because it's so much easier to do so. That happens in about four hours. 

We want to see if Gary's bloodwork/allergy levels etc look better now that we've had them on the insect-based dry food and fish-only wet food for many weeks on end. Gary himself seems to be thriving; he's gaining weight, he seems to be in a growth spurt when it comes to size, and he is full of energy and sweetness -- which he was not consistently doing any of those things before. I'm sure some of that progress is because he no longer feels ill and because his bowels and allergies are more regulated, but we will see if that is the case, officially, with some more bloodwork today.

Charlie, on the other hand, is thriving and has been thriving since the day we got him. His size and weight are rapidly reaching Hank levels (he may, eventually, become the largest cat in the house) and he remains the sweetest boy, with no health issues to report. 

I'm just excited to get them their shots and to come home, to check something else off the long-running to-do list that never ends, but just gets more things added to it. 

In other news, I almost done with vaping. I've got probably...ehhhh, 3-4 weeks left of vapes at the most, the disposable ones I've been using for years. Once they're gone, it's done. Over the course of the past week I cleaned out all of my old vape supplies, tanks, juice, mods, batteries, etc -- and put them directly into the trash. It would've hurt me to do so before because of the time, effort, and money I put into that collection of things over the years, but not anymore -- I just did not want to be tempted and did not want to think about it anymore, I want to be done with it when I am done with it. Once I'm on my last vape or two, I'll be starting up the Chantix to see if I can get off all of it, permanently. 

I just don't have a desire for it anymore. It's ceased being anything pleasurable and has just become a habit. I don't need any more habits. Habits cost money. 

Ironically, it was ten years ago today that I quit smoking cigarettes. I should probably be more proud of that than I am, but I'm kind of lukewarm on it. It's an accomplishment, yes, but it's dulled by the fact that ten years later, I am still vaping nicotine. Hopefully for not much longer, but still. 

Also, it's not like I get an award for it or anything. Nobody's going to give me trophies and wild applause, or a giant novelty check with lots of zeroes on the end of the number for quitting smoking a decade ago. I'm also that guy where if everything goes to hell and the world looks like it's going to end (meteor/comet, nuclear war, alien invasion, etc) you bet your ass the first thing I'm doing is getting a few cartons of cigarettes and will go back to eating anything I want again, because at that point who gives a shit? I'm a big proponent of dying happy. 

April Showers, Part II: Say What?

 I mentioned in my writing about North Carolina that the day before we left, I got a phone call from our doctor's office here at home, asking when a good time would be to schedule the audiology appointment I'd asked for a referral on. I have, regrettably, not yet called back to schedule that. I've been back home for a little more than a week and I have had a lot come up during that time -- plus, last week at work sucked and I desperately needed some breathing space. 

Well, we're now well into April with yet another trip looming on the horizon, and I really need to call in and get that scheduled so that I can actually see how much hearing loss I truly have -- and how much of it is latent ADHD or autism, because I honestly do not know anymore. I know my hearing feels like it's getting slightly worse by the year, though not as bad as my eyesight continually diminishes. I'd like to know how much of it is psychological versus physiological. 

My batch of new glasses from the website I frequently order glasses from is scheduled to arrive on Monday at some point, so I will finally be able to get to get up close and personal with my new prescription. I expect the ones I got covered by my insurance will become available sometime mid-week at the optometrist's office, and if so, Daisy and I can swing by to pick those up on Friday when we're out running errands. For now, I'm enjoying the last few days I have of the last few frames I really enjoyed but can't replace because they've now been discontinued. 

I shaved my beard off on Thursday afternoon as it was becoming quite irritating and itchy, and I like to have a clean face that gradually grows back out into a beard as we go through spring and into the summer months. I usually shave it again mid-to-late summer or fall, and then let it grow for about a four month period into and throughout the harshest winter months. It's a cycle. 

I say this, of course, but I don't always stick to it. Generally, I shave it when it gets too hot, too itchy or irritating, or is no longer comfortable to me. Sometimes I just use the beard trimmers to get it down near the skin but leaving stubble, and sometimes I go full baby-butt smooth. It depends on my preference at the time, really. Thursday was just a trimmer shave and I did not go fully down to the skin. 

I mentioned in my last entry that I am waiting until around the 1st of June, give or take a few days, to bleach and recolor my hair. This is partially because it needs to grow out a lot more before I can really do any meaningful dye to it that will look good a month or three later, and partially because I need to thread the needle on timeframes for the dye to bleed out a little between when it's done and when we leave for Canada -- I'd rather not leave color stains on Daisy's grandmother's sheets and pillowcases. I'm likely going black again -- I have box of black dye that has deep purple undertones that I can't wait to use. However, I also have multiple other colors, including dark blues and purples and blacks, so I am at this juncture unsure.

Daisy loves my natural medium brown hair color, and I do too -- to an extent. I say "to an extent" because since I got it cut in December, as it has grown back in I am seeing about 3x the amount of gray it had before, and I cannot stand that. I am only 43, I should not be going gray this quickly. If I want to hide the gray in my beard (which used to bother me a lot more, but now really doesn't), I can always shave it off -- I can't keep my head shaven to hide the gray there and still be comfortable at all with my appearance. As the years go on, that hairline recedes more and more, and while I still have hair I want it to look the way I want it to look, goddammit.

So yes, it's completely a vanity thing. It's shallow and superficial, I know. But I like to look good and feel like I'm in my prime, and that's difficult to do when I have more gray hair than brown. 

So, let's recap.

I'm 43, my eyesight gets worse by the year, my hearing needs checked, I've got a rapidly receding hairline, and the hair I have on my face and head is becoming more gray by the day.

Getting old sucks, man. 

Anyway.

Aside from a few wild temperature fluctuations up and down every once in a while, we're very clearly into Spring now in Nebraska. Daisy's tulips and daffodils in the front yard have all sprung up, the tree behind my office window is finally sprouting fresh new buds, and the temperatures have mostly evened out. We get highs in the 50s-70s most every day now, and we're getting rain and thunder instead of snow and ice. Unless we have some wild weather event that puts us back into the deep freeze, I'm pretty sure we're now done with snow for the season. 

Because of that, we must now dive into yard cleanup mode. Daisy and I need to take a day when we're both off and we're not sick and the weather is nice to basically gut the backyard and get all of the trash and debris out of it, gut the garden and get rid of all the old dead plants from last year, and put in the first of our new crops. Daisy wants to devote an entire raised garden bed to potatoes this year to see if we can get them to grow, and she has my full support on this. I love potatoes. I'd also love to not need to purchase them in the grocery store every week, so being able to grow them would be a win-win. I see all of this work as part of our larger house cleanup effort, so I'm down for it. We also need to completely clean out the garage too and get rid of all of the trash and junk in it that we've let build up for years, some of it sitting in the same spots it's sat in since 2018 when we bought the house. 

We're also tackling Daisy's office and her side of the closet sometime this spring/summer too. Always something else to do, of course. 

Last week, my large 32GB capacity, 40-hour battery life mp3 player that I use to listen to podcasts all night at work finally died. Its mechanisms were working fine, don't get me wrong, but the touchscreen completely stopped working or responding no matter how hard I tried or how many times I reset it. This is the third or fourth mp3 player to die tragically in as many years, so I sadly tossed it and got out my backup mp3 player (which I purchased some time ago and left in the box) to use while I looked for my next high-capacity model. 

I finally found one a few days ago and just purchased it:

Look, I understand that mp3 players are supposed to be, essentially, disposable these days -- if anyone aside from hardcore audiophiles uses them at all anymore. I don't like that concept and have never liked that concept. My favorite mp3 player I ever owned I got for Christmas in 2007 and used it almost daily until 2025 when it finally died. I would've used it for another 18 years too if it had kept working. 

On average now, I kill about one a year. It's not intentional; it's just that they get heavy use (but not anything that should damage them; I'm not hitting them with hammers or anything) day in, day out, and eventually they just stop working. I don't know if their batteries give out, if their storage gives out, or (like the last one) if the screens and controls just stop working, but one after another they all eventually die.

It is what it is, I suppose. I have no problem paying $40-60 for another good mp3 player to use until it dies on me. Maybe this one will be the one that lives for 18 years and goes with me on every trip and every adventure from now until then. Maybe it'll die in a year. Who knows. It's always a roll of the dice with these things. 

I've actually gone on a bit of a supply run with stuff on Amazon and other sites since we've returned from North Carolina, as I'd let a lot of stuff go for a while since we were trying to budget a little better. In the past two weeks, I've restocked up on:

• Soap
• Fabric softener
• Sparkling water
• Energy drinks 
• Cat food (both wet and dry)
• Deodorant
• Travel toothpaste
• Bleach
• Vitamins
• Toiletries
• Incense
• Cleaning supplies
• Water filters
• Allergy/sinus medicine
• Coconut water

Amongst some other things, I'm sure. A lot of these things were needed in the moment or have been needed for some time, and others I wait until they go on sale and then buy them in bulk. I've also now set up auto-ship orders for both the wet and the dry cat foods, since as these kids grow up they're quickly beginning to eat me out of house and home. I now have twelve pounds of dry food delivered once a month (we'll see how that goes for now) and six 12-can cases of wet food every three weeks. I can't believe how fast these cats go through food. We're now on a tuna-based wet food for them (since we're still trying to suss out Gary's allergies, and think we nailed it down to either chicken or grains) and every time I put down a can of it, it is gone within an hour or so. I don't mind giving them a couple of cans a day so that all six of them can have a go at it, and when we're out of town the Catsitter gives them three cans at a time as she's only there once a day, but as it turns out...it's expensive to feed six cats when they all need to be eating the same high-end diet to prevent one of them from being constantly sick. 

I'm going to begin supplementing that every 3 or so days with a can of actual tuna, which is (perhaps not surprisingly) far less expensive than the high-end fancy cat food we give them. I don't know how many times I've seen horseshit articles online say stuff like "don't give canned tuna to your cats, it's bad for them" though. Well, it's tuna, and I gave cans of tuna to my last three cats for years on end and they lived to 16, 17, and 18.5 years old. It's not an every day thing and they love it, so I don't necessarily see the harm in it. Cats are fine. They're resilient, they're not gonna fall over dead from eating canned tuna when canned tuna is 90% of the actual wet cat food I give them anyway. 

I would like to find another, less expensive daily food for them though. It's hard to find one that's fish-based, grain-free, and doesn't have chicken or other meat by-products in it. Believe me, I've looked. I think there are but two varieties of Fancy Feast that are grain-free and fish-only, and I still need to run them by the wife for her approval before I'd even consider ordering them.

I gave the parents probably $50 of cat food yesterday that our cats can no longer eat because of grains and additives and colors that may trigger Gary's allergies. It won't hurt their cats, and it won't hurt our cats, but it'll definitely affect one of our cats in a negative way. And, as I'd rather not make Gary sick again after we seemingly got him over the hill on this food allergy thing, I'd rather Daisy's parents attempt to put the food to use other than tossing it out or waiting a few weeks or months to drag it to the donation bin at the Humane Society, where it may or may not ever get used.

Gary is fine, by the way. He does seem to be out of the woods on this. I'm still giving him a little squirt in the mouth once a day of his digestive medicine, but it used to be twice a day and soon, before we run out, if he seems to be stable, it may be moved to once every 2 or 3 days. He is very loved, he is very loving, and his energy levels and playfulness seem to have greatly improved since we changed up his diet. So, for the moment anyway, I am pretty confident that we've kicked this problem. We shall see next weekend, when he and his double trouble brother Charlie go in for their yearly appointments and vaccinations. 

Dolly is growing up too, slowly. She was just a tiny little thing when we first got her on New Year's Eve, and I'm guessing she's now about five pounds. She appears to be in her awkward phase, where her hair has thinned out and she's become lanky and wiry, but her tail is slowly poofing up and she's getting gray tufts behind her ears. She is just as loving and playful and vocal as ever, though.

As for those DNA results? Well...

Look, Daisy and I both thought that given her appearance as a kitten, she would have a massive amount of Maine Coon DNA in her. I guessed 38%. Something told me that was the number I should hover around. 

Her actual Maine Coon DNA percentage?

Eight percent. 

The lowest percent of any of the cats in the house, including Charlie and Hank. Gary is the reigning champion at almost 26%, Mable at 25%, and then Empress at 24%.

Dolly is overwhelmingly -- almost 70% -- normal domestic western/American shorthair. She has a smattering of exotic and Persian in her, nothing eastern, 9% ragdoll and almost 4% Norwegian Forest Cat, and that's it -- everything else is normal American "mutt cat."

I almost want to do the DNA test again, because look at her:

You're trying to tell me this little girl doesn't have more than 1.4% Persian in her and is only 8% Maine Coon? Come the fuck on, that's ludicrous. I can see the ragdoll, but still. Still.

But I guess the results don't lie. The tests did say she is very likely to be gray and black and have a long-haired coat. And her health screenings are clear, she isn't prone to any known diseases or expected to contract anything based on her genetic makeup alone.

Honestly I don't care what she has in her DNA -- she is a wonderful little girl, a very loving companion, and the best "final cat" Daisy could have possibly picked for us.

The rest of the cats are fine too; Hank has been very loving and clingy since we've returned from NC, and has demanded love from me multiple times a day every day. Mable remains her needy, yelly self, though she's ramped up her aggressiveness levels towards Emmy recently for some reason -- she will just go after Emmy when all Emmy is doing is existing.

Emmy has also been very loving with us since we got home, and she's been opening up more to Daisy for affection. This surprises me because Emmy has always very much been a daddy's girl. Not that it's a competition or anything, but she is my dream cat and I have tried to train her to be more receptive to love and cuddles and rubs for years because she has always been so standoffish to everyone but Hank, Pete, and me. I long for the day where she wants to be my teddy bear in bed like Pete used to be up until the day he died. I don't know if we'll ever get there, but I eventually got there with Maggie and Sadie as they got older, so maybe.

Gary and Charlie, the Double Trouble Boys, are about the same as always. Charlie is so very smart and mischievous and Gary is the very chill daddy's boy he always has been, though I think he's more loving now that his tummy feels better. He'll always be my little boy I rescued from that cage in the stray cattery.

I guess that leaves us at where we are, Daisy and I.

We're fine. Daisy has recovered from her sickness, as I mentioned, and while she did take last Sunday off (she couldn't really speak, and the phone is 95% of her job), she has made a full recovery from whatever cold virus was ravaging her, and is back to normal. I will also mention that said virus never hit me or made me sick, but the short amount of time she was in the car with me and her parents on the way home from the airport -- wearing a mask, at that -- she gave her parents a mild version of said cold that had them sick for a couple of days last week before it moved on out. 

I'm well into week two now of Mounjaro and have had zero side effects from it. Mind you, it is the smallest effective dose, but all appears to be well in the body of Brandon. I have had zero digestive issues -- in fact, my gut health appears to have completely and totally stabilized better than ever -- and I have otherwise felt completely, perfectly normal. The only somewhat noticeable difference is that my appetite appears to have waned just a bit. Meaning, I don't get so hungry anymore that it goes off the rails into hangry territory, as it could any given day before I was on it, and...I will say that I absolutely don't need to eat as much anymore to "feel full" during a meal. That's it. Those are the only changes.

I will note that Mounjaro definitely feels different going in than the Trulicity did. I don't know if it's a different sized needle or what it is, but the Trulicity almost always hurt when it went in, whether I'd just taken one of the sticks out of the fridge or if I had let it sit for hours. The Mounjaro isn't like that. I don't even feel the injection most of the time, but I will say that there is an intense feeling a few minutes afterwards as if moves into my bloodstream -- my leg where the injection site was will feel warm, like I just gave my leg a shot of liquor. It's that spreading warmth-that's-not-warmth and after a few minutes, it fades. I don't plan to go off it anytime soon, but I wonder if the higher doses -- as I will no doubt have them stepped up every so often by my doctor -- will produce some of the nastier digestive side effects that the higher doses of Trulicity did. I sincerely hope not, as I don't like spending an hour screaming on the toilet because my O-ring decided it wanted to breathe liquid fire. 

As for intellectually, emotionally, and relationship-wise? Daisy and I are fine. We're tired and are constantly exhausted with the state of the world, but I don't think our love for one another will ever stop growing and blossoming at a constant rate. Every day I am reminded how lucky I am to have Daisy in my life, how lucky I was for each of us to find the other in this lifelong journey, especially when and how we did, and I am looking forward to our 12th wedding anniversary next month. We are partners in everything through and through, and she is the only person to come into my life who I feel really, really knows the real me. She gets me, she understands me, she knows who I am on a level that I don't even know myself on, honestly. And I adore her and very nearly worship her. I could not be happier with my wife. She is my anchor. She is my rock. I know I've said here before that I know I am not the easiest person to live with, get along with, or be married to, but Daisy makes it feel easy. Daisy makes everything feel easy, feel better than I ever could have expected. I'm very grateful for that, though I always feel like I should somehow feel more grateful. 

Anyway, that's about all that's going on right now. I'm going to slip into the cover of night and attempt to get some actual sleep before the sun comes up this morning.