April Showers, Part I: Easter

 So, we're now into April -- a quarter of the way through the year. 

We leave for Canada in a little over two months for a week-long trip. 

It's Easter weekend. 

What am I doing?

Spring cleaning and laundry, basically.

Over the course of the next few weeks I'm going to attempt to systematically gut my closet and gut my office. Anything that I don't need and don't feel the need to keep is getting trashed or donated. And that's a lot of stuff. It will be the biggest purge I've done of my closet in years, just laying waste to everything I don't want or need anymore. Jeans or slacks I haven't worn in 4+ years? Gone. If I need more I'll buy a pair off Amazon. Socks and underwear and long-sleeved shirts, hoodies, and pajama pants? I've been meaning to clean those out hard for years, they'll also go. Shoes, flip-flops, slippers, etc? The same. This is going to be a huge purge. 

Why? Well, for one, I have a good doctor now and I plan to be on Mounjaro for as long as medically necessary to get my entire body under control, and that means I'll be losing weight and a lot of the older stuff I would wear comfortably when I was a lot fatter will become useless to me. 

For two, I have collected a lot of things over the years that I just don't need, and my tastes and styles change.

For three, I now rarely leave the house unless I have to, and I don't expect that to change much. Who do I have to impress? The cats aren't going to compliment me on my nerdy t-shirts and for about 90% of them, Daisy has no idea what any of them are or what they mean. I dress for me, I collect things for me. And once I find I have no use for the things I've collected anymore, they go -- they are donated, they vanish into the ether, and I move on in my life.

For four, I've gotten a lot of new shirts, shorts, and sandals over the past year or two that I actually want to keep and wear on a regular basis, and that pushes out a lot of the old stuff that's either wearing out or I no longer need or want. My wardrobe, and closet, are cyclical and there are probably a lot of larger guys in the Omaha area who benefit greatly from my cleanouts and donations to Goodwill or to the Big Brothers/Big Sisters charity bins.

For five, I have a new glasses prescription now, so all of my old glasses with old prescriptions are getting donated so that they can be re-lensed and re-sold to other folks. Yes, a lot of charities do that. Goodwill is one of them. 

For six, I just don't need this shit. The house is filling with junk and I see piles all around me at every angle and every corner, and I desperately want the storage space to save the things that I actually need and want to keep.

For seven, finally, if we do have to flee the country at some point, I'll have a much smaller core of possessions to sort through and decide what comes and what stays to be abandoned here in Omaha. 

All of this has been a long time coming. 

The unspoken part of this, of course, is that it'll pave the way for me to slowly refill the closet again, with much more thoughtful and meaningful things of higher and more long-lasting quality -- not fast fashion, but purpose-built stuff that'll last a long time. Obviously that's not the goal, so to speak, but it is a benefit of gutting everything I don't need. 

That's a big part of my spring, actually. Knowing we have an upcoming trip to Canada where I will, inevitably, bring back some new stuff means that a lot of the old has to get kicked to the curb. 

I'm actually entering a sort of digital renaissance for a lot of my media stuff, too. I've gotten rid of the vast amount of my DVDs and CDs over the years except for the few titles I will always want on physical media, but books, comics, a lot of my games? Etc. -- it's all slowly transitioning to digital only. With that new Kindle I don't necessarily need comics or most books anymore, I can buy and download the digital versions to the Kindle and keep them forever, and they'd travel with me to each new device via my Amazon account. 

It's a weird change for me, the person who was always the physical media guy, the guy who would always rather have a paperback book than a digital device, or a CD instead of a digital file. But, I mean, at some point I had to grow up, I guess -- it's 2026, we're over a quarter of the way through our new century and past the paper and plastic era for the most part, I guess, in more ways than one. I do lament it, to some extent. I have very fond memories of reading books by flashlight long after bedtime as a kid, as most people my age do. But how much of that is left these days? I couldn't tell you; I'm not a kid anymore, I don't have kids myself, and I'm definitely not reading books by flashlight at age 43.

Physical media is always going to be a thing, of course. but I won't tell you I haven't considered just making a list of the books I've purchased over the years, boxing them all up and selling them to Half-Price Books, and then going back down the list and really being discerning about what I wanted to really read and then going to buy each one again on Kindle. 

I'd do the same with the giant stacks of cases of DVDs I have too, but they're all in binders and most places like that don't buy loose discs. What would I get out of them anyway these days? A quarter each? Not worth the hassle. 

The thing that Half-Price Books really seems to want these days are, surprisingly, magazines from the past year or three. I am convinced that in my trips over there the past few years, most of my profit came from selling the boxes of magazines I subscribe to -- Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Car and Driver, Popular Science (I was only subscribed to this one or a year or so), The New Yorker, and Poets & Writers. The only ones I'm still subscribed to at this juncture are the first two; the others I have let lapse over the years. I don't know why they're so in-demand, I just know that when I take a box or two of them over there to sell, I walk out of that place with fistfuls of cash -- for magazines that I flip through once and then put in a box.

I don't need to subscribe to any of them anymore -- I can add them to my digital subscriptions list on the Libby app for my local public library and I have the issues digitally delivered to my Kindle whenever a new one is released, and can read it for free. Do you realize how wild that is? I'll never run out of reading material for as long as I have an active account and active library card. It's almost insane. 

What a glorious future we live in, right?

You may be asking if I'm doing this to gather up another load of stuff to take back to Half-Price Books yet again before yet another Canada trip, in order to get some cash. The answer is no; after last year's debacle with trying to get Canadian cash, I'm not going to bother this time around with trying to get cash for Canada. It was stressful and stupid because I now know that there's no dedicated currency exchange locations anywhere close to the homestead or in the airport. To do that flawlessly again, we'd have to fly through Toronto, and we're not doing that this time around. 

Anyway, so yeah -- a massive decluttering, cleaning, gathering of things for charity donations, and just plain throwing away of shit is in my future over the next few months before we go off to Canada. A lot of it is going to be tedious. A lot of it is going to feel frustrating. A lot of it is going to feel so very freeing. It's all part of my goals for the year. Those are different in some respects from my New Year's Resolutions, mind you. Well, sort of. My goals for the rest of the year are pretty simple:

1. Complete the cleaning and continue into as much of a minimalist existence as possible
2. Bleach and dye hair around June 1
3. Make sure enough credit is available on cards before Canada trip
4. Get down closer to goal weight
5. Get good pictures on Canada trip for the Christmas cards
6. Make the Christmas cards early
7. Stay on track with the doctors/dentists/etc
8. Craft a no-frills Christmas with Daisy
9. Survive the year

I don't know if it can get much more basic than that. 

I put up a good number of photos from the NC trip (some of which were included in the posts here about it and one of which is my current profile picture on the book of face), but Daisy has probably a hundred more, including most of the pictures of the two of us together and more pictures of the animals and of me with my mother, that she has not edited and posted yet. Mind you, she was sick, of course.

She is fine now, by the way. Her sickness finally let up and lifted from her mid-week or so last week. She's still a little cough-y here and there, but in most definitions of the phrase, she's back to normal. 

Today is Easter Sunday. It's not a holiday for me or Daisy; both of us have to work as per the usual. I expect it to be a mostly-quiet night at work due to the holiday, especially for places with large Catholic populations. Daisy, however, is stuck calling people all day, on a holiday, during daylight hours...which sounds like straight up torture to me. 

Because it's Easter and both of us work today, we had our family dinner with Daisy's parents yesterday. It was the first time we'd really gotten to interact with them since we were in North Carolina -- yes, they drove us home from the airport but that entailed a ten-minute car ride and Daisy was sick and wearing a mask the whole time. 

Easter used to be a big deal both in my family as well as with Daisy's family -- it was one of the few times of year everyone gathered at someone's house for a big dinner. When I was a kid, whoever didn't host Thanksgiving the year before usually did Easter, and we would cycle between three or four different family homes for it. When all that started going away in the mid-2000s, Easter gatherings became less of a thing for me. There were several years running where I only knew it was Easter because of the sales at the grocery stores I worked at, or because someone mentioned it on TV. There's no big fanfare or celebration of Easter when you work retail, are writing for a newspaper, or are in graduate school, and even less of one when you live alone with your cats while doing one or more of those things.

When I married into Daisy's family, it became more of a thing again for at least the first few years when her sisters were more into the family gatherings and could reliably be expected to be here for them. Daisy's eldest sister and her family (the Denverites) never missed an Easter with us -- they would always come in from Colorado for a long weekend when the boys were young. Daisy's other sister, shortly after our wedding, moved to two different cities and provinces in Canada, then to Pennsylvania, and then again to Ohio -- so for the past decade or so, they haven't been anywhere near us for Easter like they were when I first joined the family.  The Denverites declined to come into town this year for Easter for the first time in recent memory, for ambiguous reasons (but mostly related to their soured holiday experience from Christmas, I'm guessing). All of us -- me, Daisy, and her parents -- have now come to expect that most any holiday these days we'll all be celebrating quietly and intimately as just the four of us. 

Of all of the holidays these days, Easter tends to be the one that I pretty much ignore the most -- it's purely a religious holiday for a religion that I am not a practitioner of, it's always on a Sunday, and I have never had it off work for any reason. It's not a gift-giving holiday (unless you're a kid and like chocolate eggs), its date changes every year, and it's not a holiday where everything stops, like Christmas. So I mostly tend to ignore it and I usually have a quiet night at work because of it. I don't really have any fond memories of Easter past the 80s or so, because it's been such an inconsequential holiday, but I can tell you one singular Easter story -- so here it goes.

22 years ago -- April 2004 -- was my last big family Easter gathering I can recall where it was spent as a family dinner with my own family. 

To set the stage -- I was a junior in college at the time and would graduate in a little over a year. I had just gotten together with my first "semi-serious" girlfriend -- meaning, we'd just established ourselves as a couple like, a week before -- and I didn't know what I was doing in a relationship, to be fair. I was 21 years old, having turned 21 but a few months before, and I was broke. I was also hopelessly addicted to tobacco, and I was broke -- no money to buy cigarettes, and I was out. To top it off, it was pouring a cold, icy rain that Easter Sunday, and we were to have our two dinners -- mid-afternoon with my own family, and then evening with my dad's family. 

It was the last time I was inside this particular aunt and uncle's house, a house I spent a lot of time in growing up because my youngest aunt lived next door for multiple years. I convinced my older aunt, who smoked Kool filter kings, to give me a pack of her cigarettes fresh from a new carton because I was completely out. She did so without question, thankfully.

I remember my youngest cousins, who were barely more than toddlers at the time (I don't even think one of them was even really walking yet) were buzzed up on Mountain Dew. My grandmother, who was 76 at the time, was thrilled to see me and the rest of the family all gathered in one place -- I remember seeing her sitting in the La-Z-Boy in the living room, hands folded neatly in her lap, watching the kids play and run about the place with what appeared to be a very proud, content look on her face. 

Not all of us were there, but it was most of us. My oldest and youngest aunt and their families were not in attendance to the best of my recollection, but five of the seven families of the seven children my grandmother had pushed out were there in attendance -- probably close to thirty people in that little house with a tiny kitchen and dining room and very average-sized living room. The house had been built there on the backlot of my aunt and uncle's property in the mid-80s, and before that they'd lived in another house at the far end of the gravel road this property was on.

I remember standing on the front porch, smoking one of my newly-acquired free cigarettes, and getting pelted by the rain. I didn't know this was going to be the last family gathering at the time, though I had this grand sense that my world was slowly changing. I thought about my girlfriend and wondered what she was doing, where she was spending her Easter -- she was of Romanian and Native American descent (I know, right?) and lived in the panhandle of the state several hours away. I don't know if she'd gone home for the holiday or not, as Easter came late that year (April 11) and the semester was beginning to wrap up -- Easter was a few weeks after Spring Break had came and went. 

I felt in some sense that I was at a crossroads of my life. I didn't know what that feeling really was then. I know now, though, that I was definitely in a transitionary period from dumb kid to becoming an adult -- really an adult. There had already been a few of those crossroads points in my life, and some of them were really significant, but I didn't know this one would be a crossroads point until many years later.

I see in my mind a snapshot of that moment on that cold Sunday afternoon -- me, 21, having just really quit drinking heavily, being current president (or vice-president; again, memories fail me) of the anime club at WVU, wearing my trenchcoat that even by that point was pretty much falling apart, standing on the porch with a cigarette at the what I didn't know then was the last big family dinner I'd ever attend, thinking about my girlfriend and my future and wondering where all of it, where everything after that moment, would lead. I felt a little hope for the future and a lot of fear and uncertainty. It was a moment of clarity that really sticks out hard in my memories to this day.

Of course, I know now where it all led, and all of the chaos and upheaval that would follow in the next three years or so. 

The relationship with that girlfriend would fall apart about two months later and she would end up dating one of my friends for a long period of time before falling in with one of the older guys on the outermost fringes of our friend group -- and marrying him a couple of years later. I didn't know him and still don't, but by all accounts they seemed happy and as far as I am aware, they're still married all these years later and have at least one kid, I believe. I haven't kept tabs on her and we haven't spoken since college; I was a bit bitter for a while and never really talked to her much again after our breakup, though it was fine to me that she was dating one of my other friends for a long while -- she, and he, deserved to be happy and give it a shot, and it didn't concern me.

For the most part after that point I did not drink heavily again, except on a few rare occasions, for the rest of my life up to now. 

I served one term as secretary/treasurer, two terms as vice-president (non-consecutively) and one term as president of the WVU Anime Guild, later renamed to the WVU Japanese Animation and Manga Society -- WVUJAMS -- in my last year of college. My counterpart and frequent cohort, the co-founder of the Guild who was the first president and second vice-president, was named Ben. Ben died several years ago after an illness, and it was heavily implied (though never confirmed to me) that it was either Covid or drug-related, or both. 

I graduated the next spring, and by that time I had a new girlfriend, Alley. 

I worked at the local newspaper, the microbiology lab I'd worked in during college, and at the grocery store three miles from my house all at the same time for over a year to save the necessary money to move from West Virginia to Missouri to be with Alley. It was a wild leap of faith for me. I lived with her parents for a bit, lived in a hotel for a bit, and then finally got my first apartment with her after getting the original generation of cats (Pete, Sadie, and Maggie) and the grocery store job that made me start this website -- and the rest, after that, is well documented here. Well, at least after 2011, anyway. 2007 to 2011 I collected, scrubbed off this website and turned into a book that I need to re-edit through and try to shop around to publishers again now that I'm in my forties. 

And the rest is history, I guess. After a rocky period of my life where I was single and alone and then had another short-lived, tumultuous relationship, I met Daisy and two years later we were married. 

But if you'd told me on that porch in 2004 that in the span of three years, I'd be broke, lose one girlfriend, get another, graduate from college, work three jobs for over a year, move to Missouri, live in a random farmhouse, a half-built house, a dorm room (for a week), a hotel (for over a month), an apartment where mice and roaches were rampant and squirrels broke into the closet and destroyed things before, eventually, the living room ceiling caved in, adopted three cats who would live between sixteen and nineteen years, and would only then move into another apartment before I had any real routine and stability again?

I would've looked at you like you were insane. 

If I would've gone further to say "don't worry, five years after that you'll meet the best woman -- the best person -- you have ever known, you'll marry her, and twelve years after that you'll own your own home, live in Nebraska, and have six cats" I'm sure the head of 2004 me would have exploded and my body would've rolled off the porch into the underbrush. Especially because at the time, I was absolutely not a cat person, and at the time the thought of Nebraska was "oh, where the tornadoes are?".

But I guess, sometimes, that's the way it goes.