The Isolation Diaries: Delta'd

Me and the wife at the campground in Deadwood, South Dakota, July 16, 2021.

Welcome to August, everyone. August is historically one of the worst months of the year for luck for me, but I think it'll be hard to top the shitfest that July was (though the trip to South Dakota was wonderful). With that...onward!

Sunday, August 1: Working from home, day 308

Monday, August 2: Working from home, day 309

Tuesday, August 3: Working from home, day 310

Wednesday, August 4: Working from home, day 311.

The Canadians all have Covid.

I say "all have" because Daisy's sister and our brother-in-law are pretty sick with it, but the kids are fine (at least now, anyway). Obviously the kids have it too, since it is a virus, though their own symptoms were apparently a lot milder than their parents' symptoms were/are. The kids were sick last week (as I mentioned here in previous posts). 

Because of this, they have not rolled back through Omaha yet and are still, at the moment, holed up at our brother-in-law's family's farm in Iowa. At this juncture, nobody knows when they'll be allowed back across the border into Alberta due to their infections, but it's something like "after you test clear for ten days" or something along those lines. As far as I know, it's still in their plans to stop by Omaha on their way back up to Alberta...we just don't know when that will be. Obviously they'll all have to be healed and non-communicable first before we can visit with them. Daisy's sister told her that Covid is the worst thing that she's ever been through health-wise/sick-wise.

For the record, we're fine, and the parents are fine. All of us have been vaccinated, though. We've gone about our lives as normal, as it wasn't until well after all of us were home from South Dakota that the Canadian crew got sick. 

Obviously, we're concerned and we're waiting to see what happens and how long it takes for everyone to get better/fully recover. This is sort of a microcosm of the entire country right now, actually; there's lots of talk about forced mask mandates again and state and/or city lockdowns for the hard-hit areas again, as something like 30% of the country remains unvaccinated. I'm not expecting any sort of real long-lasting returns to normalcy anytime soon -- we got a taste of normal, for a few months, and then everything exploded again, soooo....

Of course, the recent surge means what I feared, but knew would happen all the time -- this is the beginning of "wave 2" of Covid. It's Covid-19 Part 2: The Sequel. I'm not shocked or otherwise surprised; really, I'm actually relieved in a sense that it didn't take a few years for the second wave to hit, but rather it happened back to back. I will also say that people forget that there are upsides and downsides to all of this. For example, for me, the upside is that I don't expect most companies and/or workplaces who transitioned to work-at-home will be transitioning back to office settings anytime soon, including my own company. In fact I expect some companies who already went back to the office will probably end up sending their workers back to work-from-home again. If lockdowns go back into effect, my nights at work get quieter and less hectic, and I can actually get breathing space and downtime instead of constantly screaming internally all night long.

Yes, that is an accurate depiction of how some nights at work are.

Thursday, August 5:

Working from home, day 312.

The crew came this afternoon -- just as I was waking up for the day, in fact -- to take down the split tree in our front yard. It was done very quickly. I got up and looked out the window, and the tree was still there and nobody was around. I went to the bathroom, put my phone on the charger in my office, and heard chainsaws. By the time I got to Daisy's office (which looks out onto the front yard) the tree was already down and they were chopping it into chunks. I did not see it fall, I did not hear it fall, and for chainsaws, they were some of the quietest chainsaws I'd ever heard. 

It took them about 90 minutes to get it all chopped up, loaded onto the back of a big truck, and to have the branches mulched and loaded onto yet another truck. They cleaned up the sawdust and cut the stump to no more than about 4-6 inches off the grass, and then....left.

"So I guess they're gonna come back to grind the stump and get paid at a different time?" I texted Daisy.

"Yes," she replied.

During all of this action, I'd also received a grocery delivery from our local Baker's store, one that I had to put on my credit card because, well, basically most of the money we have at the moment needs to be set aside to pay the $850 the tree guys charged us for the tree removal and stump grinding. I'm sure the grocery delivery guy was all WTF when he came up to the porch to drop off my salad ingredients and Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.

The night at work was the most (relatively) quiet Thursday I've worked in a long while. I say "relatively" because while there was a decent amount of issues on the books for us, I didn't have to watch or own everything and actually spent a good chunk of my night reading and playing on my phone -- for the first time in a long time I wasn't getting killed by a Thursday, and I was happy about that. 

Friday, August 6: Day off.

Saturday, August 7: Day off.

Student loans today were put on hiatus through the end of January, which is good -- that's four more months that I don't have to pay them and four more months that hopefully something can be done about canceling student debt. I'm not holding my breath, but...

The tree folks have not yet come back to finish their work -- they still have to grind the stump (what little of it is left) into mulch and level it off at ground level, and after that is when we'll pay them. They have piss poor communication, so this could either happen tomorrow or it could happen two weeks from now, we don't know. I hope they give us warning at some point.

The other tree remains in the yard, the tree that lost half its branches in the storm -- I don't think another storm of that caliber will take it out the rest of the way, at least I'd hope not -- but what branches it has left, if they do come down in a storm, would do far less damage to property/the neighborhood than the tree we had removed would have. 

After work had ended this morning and I was wrapping up everything on my shiny new computer downstairs, Daisy asked me if I'd be interested in going to Walmart tonight -- she wants to get black paint to paint our bedroom door and closet door, since black interiors is now apparently in vogue in the home decor world. I told her I was open to that, as there was indeed some stuff I needed from Walmart that I'd had waiting in my online cart (string cheeses, lettuce/carrots for my salads, etc). When she returned home from work tonight, we went.

As an aside, I have vastly changed my eating habits. I've mentioned this here before, but it bears repeating. Most of the time, my daily diet consists of the following:

1. a big salad with fatty dressing -- may or may not contain Quorn meatless pieces, one or more types of cheese, (vegan) bacon bits, sunflower seeds, and some croutons -- usually containing 1-2 types of lettuce, as well as cucumbers, carrots, and on rare occasions (if we have them) avocado and/or green peppers

2. 4-8 sticks of string chesse (spread throughout the day)

3. something snacky (some crackers or chips sparingly, lots of nuts/seeds, trail mixes)

4. 1-2 cans of V8

5. sometimes items (meaning, stuff I don't have every day) -- a sandwich or two on low-carb bread, a wrap on a low-carb tortilla, microwave, air-popped, or kettle-popped popcorn, fries or other potatoes, other vegetables that Daisy roasts or sautees, low-or-no-carb pasta dishes (such as hearts-of-palm pasta or zucchini noodles), steamed vegetables with vegan butter and Quorn, fried-chicken-style soy curls, coffee creamer(s), and an occasional odd-or-end snack

6. At least 32oz to 2L of water, usually with Mio or Sodastream seltzer with zero-sugar flavoring

Looking through that list, do you notice anything? Most of it is low or zero carb, or low or zero sugar. The only stuff that's not exceedingly low-carb, low-sugar are the snacky things I eat, like crackers or chips, or the popcorns, and I eat so much less of that stuff than I did before. Gone or mostly nonexistent from my diet are heavy breads, pastas, pizza, full sugar sodas, full sugar anything, ramen noodles, most soups, candy/sweets, baked goods -- even sweet fruits like apples and bananas, which I both love -- anything that would add to my carb/sugar count for the day.

I take several different vitamins/supplements every day in addition to my medications, I take probiotics, and I stay as hydrated as possible. I still drink soda but it is diet or zero sugar, and I still drink energy drinks, though they are also always zero sugar/zero carb. 

I think I'm doing pretty well, though there is always some room for improvement -- in some cases, a lot of room. With all of this in mind though, I almost always have a set list of things I need to get while grocery shopping now, and most of it is far cheaper in general than what I used to eat. If I plan everything right, theoretically I could get in one trip enough food to last me for the better part of a month -- which is great in the event all of us go into Covid lockdown again.

So we went to Walmart -- physically -- which was a huge cause of stress for us as well as a huge cause of anxiety for Daisy. Walmart on a Friday night in the middle of summer is a special type of hell -- mind you, I'm not a huge fan of Walmarts in general, but I do think the company (similar to Amazon) is a necessary evil -- people need to be able to get groceries and household supplies/items cheaply, and Walmart fulfills that need. During our Walmart trip (wearing masks), I saw maybe five people -- aside from the workers -- wearing masks, and the store is being remodeled, so the aisles are about half as wide as they normally are. Everyone was in our way, everyone decided to stand directly in front of the items we needed at the worst possible times to stand there, and generally the entire store just made me angry. Daisy got anxious, and I got angry. I'm glad we got out of there when we did, because I was at about the point where I wanted to start literally kicking people out of my way. 

Friday also starts the...

Because you know I needed another reason to show this off.

...which is carrying on as per the usual despite the Delta variant rapidly spreading everywhere. Suddenly all eyes are on one little piddly town in South Dakota where, almost purely by coincidence, I spent a good chunk of time in about three weeks ago. It's amazing how small our country/world can be at times. 

I've spent the better part of those three weeks trying to post a gallery of the pictures I took while on the trip (most, if not all of which were posted here in the posts about the trip) on Facebook, and every time I tried, it has errored out. I finally switched to a different browser tonight -- Firefox, which I have not used for longer than about five minutes in the better part of two years -- and it let me post them. 

Some of you may ask "but why didn't you just post them from your phone?" Because that's a pain in the ass and the job is much more suited to a desktop computer, where I can type things. My phone is a mobile games, texting, and timewasting platform upon which I only very occasionally speak to someone through with my mouth, and that's about it. I am very old-school and would much rather use a computer for 95% of things that most people would use a smartphone for. 

On Saturday, the wife and I got up early and went to the parents' to see them -- since the Canadians are still holed up in Iowa, they haven't been back this way yet and haven't spread any offshoot infection chances to the parents, so it's still safe to visit. From what the parents relayed, I guess the Canadians are doing a bit better -- they're shooting for a return to Alberta by next week. I don't know if that's going to be logically or physically possible if they're still really sick, but I guess that's their overall goal. They may or may not be coming through Omaha on the way home, and if any of them are still sick while traveling, I really hope they don't. It's not that I don't want to see them -- I do, especially my shadow niece -- it's that I don't want them to risk infecting others, or infecting us asymptomatically so that we in turn spread it to others unknowingly. It's a really painful, sad situation for me emotionally, as I'm sure it is for Daisy and her parents, too. Everything's still up in the air, so we have no clue what's going to happen or when they'll be back in Canada at this point. I have a feeling they're going to be down here in the states a lot longer than they think they will be, even if it means they have to park the RV in a border town and wait it out until they're allowed to cross. 

In other news, severe storms were predicted for the area today...and they did not disappoint.

Mind you, in the past month we've gone from having two large, healthy trees in our front yard to...one and a half trees, and then, once the cracked one was removed...half a tree. Well, maybe 70% of a tree. The tree that remains is the one that all the big branches came off of in the storm several weeks ago, which leaves us with some tall, thinner branches/trunks on it that are big, but flexible, and not really thick enough to do major damage to anything unless they landed on cars or busted out house windows when/if they fall. The tree otherwise seems pretty healthy, and had a large chunk cut off it a few years ago before we bought the house (there's a stump about four feet off the ground on the main trunk). Because of this I'm not incredibly anxious it'll fall and destroy something, but if we get a bad enough storm, that is of course a possibility. Daisy and I have plans for the fall or spring to get another tree service to come out and "trim" it down to where it's shorter than our house and much less likely to fall and damage anything -- like giving the tree a crew cut, of sorts -- to let it slowly grow back and up from that point. That'll be a few hundred dollars as well, likely, so provided it doesn't become a problem before then, it'll a good investment in our peace of mind. 

Anyway, this morning (before we went to the parents') a storm rolled through with some pretty close lightning, loud thunder, and really heavy rain for about an hour or so. There was not really any wind with it, but it came fast and it came down hard. It was sort of jarring and frightening, as it came at the same speed as the storm did a month ago -- from nothing to full-on storm in the span of a minute or two. 

I told Daisy this afternoon, as we were running some errands, that I used to love storms -- they were one of my favorite things on the planet to watch and experience -- until storms took out our retaining wall in 2019 (thousands of dollars to fix and rebuild) and then damaged both of our trees a month ago, costing us over $1000 to deal with between the two of them. Now I've got an amazingly high amount of anxiety and nervousness about storms and I do not know at this juncture how to compartmentalize that and/or just deal with it, because now when I think about storms all I can think about is how much damage they'll do and how much it's going to cost us. I stress about money a great deal anyway; this is not something else I need to add to the list. 

We got home, ate, and I went upstairs to take a nap in my chair. I was awakened around 9pm by...something. I didn't know what. I realized as I woke up a little more that it was thunder, but it did not sound like normal thunder -- it sounded like bombs being dropped, not the rolling thunder sound you're likely used to. That was followed by some really bright lightning, hard rain, and what also sounded like small hail hitting the roof and the sides of the house. I was in my room in the dark and the lightning was so close and so frequent that it looked like daylight outside. That lightning also let me see that while there was a little wind, it wasn't crazy and certainly not enough to damage anything. The thunder and lightning moved off after a short while, but the heavy rain continued for a while -- I eventually fell back asleep in the chair for another two hours or so once the loud stuff moved off. What awoke me was my phone and Alexa going off to tell me that we were now under a flash flood warning in Omaha.

Cool, I thought, I'm not anywhere near a flood plane and am actually near the top of a hill, so we should be fine. 

The downtown area was not so lucky:

That photo was shared by one of the local news stations once everything had rolled through, and is a shot of but a small chunk of the downtown "Old Market" area about 5-ish miles from our house (give or take, anyway, it might be a little more). Apparently something like 14,000 people lost power and some locations got penny-sized hail. No tornadoes though, thankfully, and no damaging winds anywhere that I saw. Most of this heavy rain I slept through, and when I awoke after it was done, I looked out at the front of the house. Wet streets, no branches down, no flooding. Cool, life could resume as per the status quo, at least at my place. 

Sunday, August 8: 

Working from home, day 313.

Well, that's done.

The tree and stump are both gone now, and our checkbook is $850 lighter. In our front yard where the tree and stump were is now a not small, but not overly large pile of fresh mulch and sawdust, which will be going into our garden area out back over the next few nights (weather permitting, of course). 

There are few things more bittersweet than knowing that a major stressor you had is now taken care of, but you're so much poorer for having taken care of it. I have to look at it in the sense of what-ifs; what if the storm last night would have had high winds and we hadn't taken the tree down? The damage could've been catastrophic for us or for our neighbors. Indeed, some of the little towns to the west of Omaha got hammered with really high winds again, and I saw a lot of tree damage in photos on Facebook this afternoon. It happened to us once and it can happen again. 

I've been thinking as of late about the other stuff I need to get done, and various other life goals. Mind you, I've never really had life goals or a five year plan or anything like that; I used to, when I was more idealistic and far more naive. I was very much a "go for the gold, shoot for the moon" sort of person in my twenties until real life beat it out of me -- but I do have but three and only three real life goals at the moment:

1. be under 300 pounds before I'm 40, and

2. have my novel published by the time I'm 40, and

3. use the money from selling the novel to be able to quit my current job.

The first is likely the most attainable of the three. I turn 40 next December, so I have sixteen months. 

As for the second and third -- yes, I am working on a novel. It is in the very rough planning stages right now and I've not actually written any of the text of it yet. I'm trying to brainstorm the story and the character arcs at the moment. What I can tell you is that it's not a sci-fi or fantasy story, but a very down-to-earth story about a family coming together after a tragic but sort of (darkly) hilarious event. The whole point is to try to do something very different than the stories I would like to write, but do not have the talent to actually do -- the aforementioned sci-fi and fantasy. I can write about a family dynamic. I think I can write about a family dynamic really well. But we'll see. I don't know yet that I have full confidence in myself to commit to getting it done, or that what I'll produce will be anything actually worth reading. Plus, to sell it and get it published I'd need to get a literary agent and/or find a press who wanted the book and yeah, that's gonna be even harder with a pandemic raging at the moment.

Forty will be a big milestone for me. It's the year where I thought I'd finally have my shit together and would be doing what I wanted to do with my life, so I guess my life goals are part of trying to make that into a reality. I didn't want to manage people for a telecom company or teach low-level English classes my entire life, nor did I want to be without a vehicle I loved. I did want to be married and own my own home by age 40, so I'll have that going for me, but still. I wanted kids but never had them, and now I feel mostly too old for them (nieces/nephews and cats are fine too), but the weight was and always has been a big problem -- especially now that I'm diabetic. I need to get the weight off me whether my body wants to do it or not. I haven't been to the gym in two weeks -- I've been really stressed and anxious about everything that's been going on with the weather and house and the trees, and though I do sometimes have the energy to gym it up, my heart just hasn't been in it. I've been retreating into a sort of shell as of late -- I'm not depressed, I'm not sad (I actually have been feeling great, despite all the bad shit that's happened over the past month) -- I just want to be left alone to decompress and not have to think about things or worry about things. All of the bad things that have kept happening as of late have just beaten me down.

Daisy asked me if I was excited about our upcoming trip to West Virginia in October, and my answer was "not really; it's going to take so much time and it's going to be so expensive." And I wanted to go in summer, not October when it's cold. October on top of the mountain in West Virginia means possible snow, because it's happened there that early before, and it means I'll have to wear heavier clothing everywhere and therefore take heavier clothing with me, and it'll be dark early in the evening because the days will be shorter and yeah...the longer it goes and the closer the trip gets, the more it feels like a chore or an obligation and the less it feels like a vacation. 

Of course, if the Delta variant gets worse, who knows if we'll be able to make the trip out there at all. Let's just say that for the moment I'm not putting all of our plans in stone. 

Monday, August 9:

Working from home, day 314.

The Canadians are doing better; I spoke to my brother-in-law last night. He is much improved, and Daisy's sister is apparently "through the worst of it" now, though she's still coughing pretty badly. The kids are fine and have been fine for days.

The heat here is oppressive this week; for the third time this summer, we have now had a week or so of near-100-degree temperatures with high humidity, making the actual air temperature/heat index soar well above 100. It's not something we generally see in Nebraska, but was commonplace when I lived further south in Missouri, and much further south in Kansas. I enjoy summer. I really do. But I enjoy summer being summer, not summer being hell. 

The past two nights at work haven't been terrible, but neither of them I'd really classify as "fun." I've been trying to keep my chin up and soldier on as infantry in the telecom war, but my heart really hasn't been in it for some time now. For the longest time, working from home was much easier for me. I was able to focus more, I was able to methodically take care of my nightly tasks with precision and free of distractions, and it was a great feeling. These days, while I can still do all of those things, my care levels and, well, I guess passion I once had for doing the best work possible has sort of slowly drained away. Mind you, I'm still one of the best there is at what I do (and I am recognized as such by multiple peers and some higher leadership) but overall -- as I've discussed with Daisy multiple times -- I feel undervalued and feel like I am meant for so much more than this. I am middle management in a job full of middle-management-and-lower workers, I have no real prospects for promotion or for anything more than a slight yearly or bi-yearly raise unless someone goddamn dies/quits/is fired, and I would rather not fill the shoes of the next position up from me -- program director -- officially, as it is a soul-sucking, life-draining job that I already do most of the work of unofficially and without the title anyway due to the mostly ineffectual leadership we have now.

Don't get me wrong, both of my current directors are good guys, and I've known them for years (I've actually worked there longer in our program than either of them have), but there's a lot of work I do in that place, and proverbial grenades I jump on, that one or both of them should absolutely be doing instead of me. Delegation of tasks is one thing -- having an underling do something that you should very clearly be doing but don't want the hassle of is quite another. I've already worked two such issues this week and will likely work several more over the next few days. It's not that it necessarily creates resentment, it's that it creates a sense of them being little more than figureheads -- and if I'm going to be doing the work anyway, just give me the title and the $15k+ pay bump that comes with it. I've got 21 people reporting directly to me now -- not to anyone else, but to me solo. Give me the paycheck to warrant that. Give me some actual institutional power to actually organize things and make some structural changes to schedules and staffing. 

Hah, like any of that will ever happen.

Tuesday, August 10: Working from home, day 315

Wednesday, August 11: Working from home, day 316. 

The Canadians have tested clear and are heading back home on Thursday, all of them in good spirits, but travel weary and are looking forward to being back in Alberta. Last night they arrived in Omaha, set up the RV at a campground outside/to the west of the city, and then drove the van over to the parents' to see everyone. Though I was quite apprehensive to do so given their "just cleared" status, Daisy and I want over there (fully masked, despite being vaccinated, and with anti-bac at the ready) to see them -- after she got off work for the night but before I needed to start my own shift.

I'm not sure of their status on being allowed back into Canada, but based on what they told us last night, they should be okay to do so. Everyone else is cleared, and our oldest niece has a 72-hour window to get in with them after she has a clear Covid test before she has to repeat the process, etc etc. I only really got the barest details of what they said the entire process entails to get all seven of them safely back across the border, but I guess all of them would know it far better than I would. 

As mentioned previously, the kids were all fine -- there was a day or two where they were sick at the beginning, but they recovered fast and far more quickly than the adults did. Once the sick left them, though, it apparently left them quickly -- Daisy's sister was back to normal last night, with no coughing or breathing issues I could see, and said that the only thing still bothering her was that her sense of taste was still quite diminished. Our brother-in-law seemed fine too. 

"It was far worse this time around than it was the first time," he said, in casual conversation.

"Hold up," I said, to make sure everyone was paying attention. "--the first time?"

"Yeah, we all had it once before, back at the beginning, in March 2020," he said. "That time it was just like a mild cold."

Up until this point I didn't know that they'd all had Covid before. March 2020 was indeed the very beginning of everything, when the pandemic really ramped up. 

Of course, they were all delighted to see us. My youngest niece -- my shadow -- lit up when she saw I was there and tried to come running to me multiple times, but her parents made her wash up and put on her little mask first (just as a precaution). We went there on the pretense that we wouldn't hug or get close to the kids or anyone else and wouldn't touch any surfaces we didn't have to, so my dilemma was...do I let my shadow actually be my shadow again, as she wanted to be? Do I let her run up, hug me, attach herself to my leg as she did before in South Dakota?

I...I am a big softie. Of course I did.

I weighed the risks -- the kids should be fine at this point; they had it before their parents did and got over it quickly, I'm vaccinated, I'd change my clothes (I did) and/or shower again when I got home (I didn't, I didn't have time) just to further negate any extra risks, and who knows when I'd see these kids again or if my niece will still idolize me when they're stateside the next time around. 

We weren't able to stay long (a little less than two hours) but in that time, my niece spent as much time with me as she could. She had me read to her, she played tag with me and made me chase and catch her, and she was just thrilled I was there. It's so sweet and so endearing. I've never had children of my own, obviously, and the other kids never really seemed to be as enamored with me when they were younger (with the exception of possibly my oldest nephew from the Denverites, but he grew out of it as he got older, and my oldest Canadian niece when she was much, much younger -- but both of them had much more of a kinship with their aunt Daisy than me). Truth be told, I'm not great with kids -- I've gotten better over the years, but I've never been a natural. Daisy is a natural with all of them -- the Denverites' kids too -- but she's also been in most of their lives from the start. I came in late to the party; even our oldest niece was five when Daisy and I met, so she's the same age my shadow is now. 

Upon leaving for home, Daisy made plans to go to the campsite after work today to spend some time with them before they leave in the morning. I knew that I wouldn't have the time or energy to do it again before work tonight, so I let them all know then that I wouldn't be attending. Daisy has the car across town and is much closer to the campsite than I am anyhow -- in order for me to do that, she'd have to drive back across town to pick me up, then go all the way back out west (and even further) to the campsite, which would add basically an extra hour of driving, or more, to our timeframe. I still have to eat and caffeinate myself and work all night, plus -- again -- it's 100 degrees outside. 

Before I was even really awake and mobile, Daisy texted me that she was on the way out to the campsite with the parents. She video-called me from the campsite so that my shadow niece, who was really sad that I wasn't there, could see me and chat with me for a few minutes. It was very sweet -- it is likely the last time I'll see the kid for a while, as while we all have tentative plans to gather in South Dakota again next summer, who knows if that will actually happen. I hope it does, but at the moment I'm not holding my breath for all of it. 

Thursday, August 12: Working from home, day 317

Friday, August 13: Day off.

Saturday, August 14: Day off.

The Canadians left for home on Thursday morning as planned. I personally haven't heard from them since, though I did text my brother-in-law to wish them all a safe journey back up to the Great White North. I can only assume that they're home now or are on the last legs of their journey to get there. 

This weekend was supposed to be the time we'd be prepping for travel to West Virginia (on the original schedule we had a few months ago, anyway). Obviously, that's not happening now for myriad reasons, the least of which being we don't have the money for it at the moment after all the tree bullshit and our trip to South Dakota. Daisy has always told me that I have a "poverty mindset" when it comes to money and managing it. I've never been entirely sure what she means by that term. I just know that I was poor for a very long time during multiple long stretches of my life, and because of that I am always very anxious about money.

Same.

It's part of why I always play the lottery when I'm out and about and have a few bills in my wallet -- it's about the only thing I ever carry cash for. My entire life's goal is to never have to work for a living ever again; it's to be able to pursue my creative endeavors as well as my own personal need for laziness and sloth on my own time at my own speed without having to worry about how much food will cost for the month or whether we'll have enough in the bank to cut a check when the mortgage comes due. Daisy wants me to get a job with a 401k -- my current job offers that, but I make so little that it wouldn't be worth it and would end up doing more harm than good at the moment. Also, laughably, she thinks that I'm ever going to be able to retire. I'm a failed writer with zero marketable skills that apply to the real world -- unless one of those lottery tickets hits, I'm likely to never be able to retire.

However, for as cautious and as worrisome as I am about money, I do seem to spend a lot of it. Yesterday was payday for me,  and in addition to paying my bills this morning, this is how I/we spent money today:

1. $120 on stuff/household groceries on Amazon -- cat litter, my V8s, coffee, etc.

2. $40 at Burlington on soap and new shorts

3. $30 at PetSmart for the other brand of cat litter we use

4. $11 on a second order on Amazon to purchase cat food that was sold out at...

5. Walmart, for a $60 delivery order of cat food and other household essentials

6. $60 to send three birthday presents to my parents via Amazon -- a book for my dad, a 96-count box of K-cups for both of them to share, and a tie-dye hoodie for my mother, and

7. $44 at Asian Market -- a trip the wife made while I was asleep this evening, so I have no idea what she got.

I've been under a lot of stress for the past few weeks, as most of you are probably aware. I am doing my best to process it and let it leave my body. Sometimes that's easier said than done. One of the things that works really well for me is what most folks commonly refer to as retail therapy -- getting myself something new that I can enjoy really does help center me. I don't know why, it just does. Part of it is probably that poverty mindset that Daisy refers to. When I graduated from grad school and that weight was off my shoulders, I went on a shopping trip with Daisy and probably spent close to $100 on flip-flop sandals alone. After the past few weeks of dealing with the trees and being anxious about thunderstorms and actually not being able to sleep very well, this morning I told Daisy that if she was willing, I wanted to make a quick trip to Burlington and Home Goods.

Now, mind you, for most of my life, Burlington -- once known as Burlington Coat Factory -- has been one of my favorite stores. They were one of the very few "discount" chains in Pittsburgh (and later, Omaha) who sold clothing in my size and for reasonable prices. The "coat factory" part of the name also lived up to its reputation, as both of my first two trench coats were bought in the Burlington store in Pittsburgh in the mid-to-late '90s. Yes, I had two -- my black one eventually fell apart around 2006-07 after a decade of heavy use, and my gray one I eventually donated to a Goodwill or similar store shortly after getting married. These days, for cold weather, I have a long black wool coat, as well as a well-worn faux-leather bomber jacket and my military jacket.

But I digress. My point is that Burlington, for many years, was my hub for nearly any clothing item I'd need. If I needed some new jeans or button-up shirts/polos? Burlington would have them, and in multiple designs from multiple manufacturers, usually pretty inexpensively. If I needed new underwear or socks, I knew I could always find them at Burlington in the proper sizes for the proper prices. Much of my "office wardrobe," as I called it -- back when I was forced to dress business casual in the first year or two of my current job -- came from Burlington, shortly after the wife and I were married. That's because, at the time, I could actually find that stuff there.

At some point between my move to the midwest and my move to Omaha to marry Daisy, Burlington dropped the "coat factory" from their name and their stores slowly, slowly began getting...shall we say...crappier? I don't know how else to put it. What I can say is that the Burlington stores I visited seven years ago at the beginning of our marriage, and could very easily spend $200 in every time we went to them, degenerated quickly into disorganized messes of clothing and junk stores barely a step up from thrift stores. Now mind you, I like thrift stores -- I've been in some amazing thrift stores over the years -- and compared to my Burlington experiences of the past year or two, let me tell you, the thrift stores were far better-kept. 

A little over a month ago I went to Burlington to get some new shorts for the summer -- they were well-stocked and the store was a bit messy, but was moderately okay. Today when we went, the store looked like a tornado hit it and there were very few things I even remotely wanted. I got three pairs of shorts, the last ones that were even close to my style in my size, and found a few sets of what I like to call "man soaps" -- bar soap specifically meant for men, with masculine scents -- for $2 each, and we got the fuck out of there. It was awful. People were everywhere, the checkout lines were long and stretched back through the store, the aisles were a wreck, unwatched children were running around tearing shit up, etc. It was a nightmare. Daisy and I nearly had panic attacks from all the insanity surrounding us, and had to take a few minutes to calm ourselves once we were back in the car before we could do anything else. I apologized to Daisy for putting her through that, but it was also sort of an apology to myself for putting myself through it was well. It was not pleasant. 

"Why do you buy more shorts?" Daisy asked me in the car. "You have shorts already."

This was a valid question that deserved an equally valid answer.

"I do," I told her, "but they do wear out after a while and begin to fall apart, and then I have to throw them away or donate them. Same as any other clothes. I wear them, they get old and ragged and wear holes in them or what-have-you, and then they get replaced."

In all fairness though, I've probably bought more shorts and underwear during the pandemic than any other clothing item of any sort over the past few years combined. All of my underwear started wearing out around the same time, to the point where I'd slowly cycle them one-by-one out of my closet and directly into the trash can when the elastic gave way or they developed large wear-and-tear holes, etc. I do the same with the rest of my clothing, as well. I need to go through my side of the closet sometime between now and the fall months and clean it out/reorganize it all -- there's so much old clothing in there I'll never wear again that needs to be donated, shoes I bought years ago and never wore that need to be put into rotation, and just...general upkeep and a refresh, I guess. There's a lot of stuff I like, yes, but just liking it doesn't mean I need to keep it. A lot of it just needs to go so that other large dudes my size can get it from the thrift shop and properly use and enjoy it. 

I told Daisy I'd like her to do the same with her own side of the closet and to make it a priority so that we can do a small part to un-fuck this mess of a house we own. After cleaning out the garage earlier this summer and finding things I've been looking for over the past three years, I just know there's entire boxes of things in this house that I've "forgotten" about that I want/need to find. I know somewhere in Daisy's office or in her closet that there's a full box of my clothing and other goods -- jackets, hats, etc -- that I never would've donated, stuff that I wanted to keep. There's also a box full of my spindles of CDs somewhere, including the record collection that I actually bought and paid retail for that I know is somewhere in this house, yet I do not know where. It's giving me fits because I know they're here somewhere and I want to digitize/archive them along with the rest of my music collection. 

Sunday, August 15:

Working from home, day 318.

Daisy went out to lunch/early dinner tonight with one of her former coworkers, a girl she knows far better than I do but someone I would also classify as a mutual friend. It's good for Daisy to get out and be a little social; she's been cooped up in this house with me for 18 months now and we've really not done many social things at all, aside from the South Dakota trip. One of the many reasons I married Daisy is that once she and I got together, she very much became a homebody just like myself. She sort of lost a lot of her "go out clubbing on the weekend" ways within a year or so of us being married, in favor of us spending as much time together as possible. Now that she's much older and the world is trying to climb its way back out of a pandemic, she views people and social situations (for the most part) very similarly to the way I do -- "ew, people, no."

But she does make time for friends and for adventures with friends, and that's a big difference between me and her. It's not that I don't make time for friends, it's that I really don't have many in the area who aren't people I work with (who I interact with, whether I want to or not, five nights a week anyhow). I didn't grow up in Omaha, I didn't go to high school and college in Omaha, and the only friends I did have in Omaha for the longest time were Rae (who I went to grad school with, and who was also in my wedding) and her husband -- and they eventually moved out of town and went back to Ohio. Aside from family, the only other people in this town I really know are Daisy's friends or the people I work with. I think that's part of why I don't really have a connection with Omaha. It's a nice city for the most part, and I'm perfectly happy (again, for the most part) with living here, but I don't feel connected to it. It's just where I live for the moment. I obviously felt connection with Morgantown -- it's where I was born and where I grew up -- and I even felt connections of sorts with Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Newton. I worked for the newspaper in Newton. I knew the community, I knew the types of people who lived in town. I could navigate the town flawlessly. It was where I rented my first house, first lived alone, bought my first car. It's where I met Daisy in person for the first time and where I proposed to her several months later. 

I don't miss the situations I was in when I lived in those other places, though -- broke poor, scraping by, working my ass off to pay the bills and skipping many meals to be able to keep the lights on, gas in the car, and food in the cats' bowls -- I am very grateful and happy to have a decently-paying job now, a wonderful woman I'm married to, enough food in the house to last weeks or months, and enough money to say, spend $1,150 to work on or remove two different trees from the yard of the house I own and not have it bankrupt us. I am blessed in many ways. As age begets wisdom, I'm realizing that much more now as I get older. 

I've talked a lot here in the past about my depression; it is something I'll always live with to a certain degree, something that will always be there in the background of my life. However, over the past year and a half or so, I've noticed it dwindling. I've noticed it slowly going away more and more. There's nothing to say it won't come back, or that I won't have a bad day, few days, or a week here or there, but a lot of it has simply vanished. I don't exactly know how or why, but I'm not mad at it. In its place has come...a sense of peace? Sort of? I don't know how to describe it. I have wants and needs, yes, and I'll never be completely satisfied by life, but for the most part, I am at peace with where I am and what I'm doing. Here's my problem, though -- I don't like to get too comfortable. Comfortability breeds laziness and complacency, and I have a real problem with that. I don't want drama or even action, per se, but some good things can start happening a little more frequently (and bad ones a little less frequently) and I'd be okay with that. 

From an outsider's perspective, 2020 and 2021 for me and Daisy would sound like a nightmare if I went down the laundry list of everything that had and has gone wrong, because there's been a lot of that. I've documented almost all of it here. But for all of the bad things, there's been a lot of good, and it's started at home. I've been working at home for well over a year now, and have even gotten raises and bonuses, something I thought would never happen again. Daisy gets to work from home about half the time now too. I've been trying to focus a lot more on my health, and have been trying to make goals and fulfill them.

I told Daisy last night, on our drive home, the very rough rundown of the novel I'm working on, its title, and about some of the plot and the characters in it. As mentioned here above, it is very down to earth, very family-based, and I've drawn a lot of inspiration for it from our actual family -- the characters, the situations, the mindsets -- and it's completely unlike anything I've ever written before. I expected Daisy to be like "no, you can't write that, that's too close to real life, even if you change names and backgrounds, people will know you based characters on them," etc. Instead she was very open and very interested in where I wanted the plot to go and how I wanted it to progress. She asked a lot of questions (most of which I could not answer so that I didn't give away big chunks of the plot) and was very supportive/encouraging of the ideas, even if she thought some of it was a little weird -- namely my plans for the novel's sequel, which I had the ideas for beforehand. 

"It may sound weird now, but it'll make sense once it's all written," I said. 

I'm giving myself until the end of September to flesh out everything and detail the plot structure the way I want it to be, revising characters' roles, even cutting some out, finalizing names and places and anything else I can think of -- before I start writing it in earnest. My goal is to have a finalized draft of a publishable novel by the day I turn 40 -- December 20, 2022. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to have it published by that time, but I somehow doubt that's going to be possible. I don't know how many of you have ever worked in the publishing industry of how many of you have tried to get your written works published somewhere before, but it is not exactly easy. I wrote what, in my opinion, was some damn good poetry, and I've only ever had one poem ever published in a literary journal (over ten years ago now) ...and it wasn't even one of my better ones, it was just one that the editors apparently liked. I've read tons of novels and lit mags and journals over the years and let me tell you, not a lot of it is good. Some is okay. Some of it is great and absolutely deserved to be published, but I've seen a lot of just...well, crap in some pretty noteworthy publications, stuff that boggled my mind as to why anyone would ever think it was worthy of publication. I know taste is subjective, of course, but I've been stunned by some of the stuff I've seen in print getting acclaim as if it were actually good.

I know my limitations. I know there are some things I can do well and some things that I really can't do well, despite my good intentions. I can write this novel and have it succeed, but I'm going to need time and much more than that, luck, in order to make it happen. I have flights of fancy about book signings and Q&A sessions and the like, but I have to push those thoughts out of my head and focus on the work.

"I know you want to do this," Daisy said. "I know it is important to you, and I know your blog is important to you as well, but perhaps you should take a break from the blog for a bit and just focus on getting the book written. Take time out every day to write a little more instead of writing so much in the blog, and focus on the book."

She has a point -- I only have so much time. The blog will suffer for a while during the time I'm writing the book; there's no real way around that. But I also see the blog as an exercise, as practice, as a tool in refining my writing and making it flow better. It is a conscious thing; it's part of the reason I write out, in as much detail as possible, the stories of things like the storm that took out the tree, or the trip to South Dakota (which was a large inspiration for the novel). I want to document everything, I want to tell stories, I want to create these worlds with vivid description so that you can see them the way I saw them through my own eyes. Some times that's easier said than done, others it's not -- it took me three weeks to write the entire story of the South Dakota trip here, and the trip itself was four days. Writing about that trip was an exercise in perseverance, an exercise in determination -- I would do it, it would be written about in as much detail as possible, and I would finish the fucking story. That was a test to myself as to whether I could really focus on something writing-based and really complete a writing goal. 

Just because I was curious, I copied-and-pasted the two South Dakota posts into a blank word document just to see how long it really was. At 12-point font, it was 53 pages (pictures included) and 24,419 words. I did that over the course of about three weeks -- just writing here in my free time and when I could sit down for a few hours at once. That tells me that given the right motivation and time, I could write the novel over the course of about 2-3 months, give or take. It's very do-able. 

When something's important to you, you make the time, I guess.

Monday, August 16:

Working from home, day 319.

This is one of the rare days where I didn't turn on, or even touch, this computer -- instead I got up, finished Loki, moved on to What If...? and watched the latest episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

I owned three different issues all night long at work and made/took more phone calls than I've probably had to do in a month. It was draining, and I was in bed by 8:30.

Tuesday, August 17:

Working from home, day 320.

Hustle Tuesday.

The Canadians have successfully made it home to Alberta, where they immediately entered another two-week quarantine per Canadian regulations since they crossed the border. This means they can't really do anything in public until the beginning of September, even though all of them are clean and tested clear before crossing into Canada. 

I mean, it is what it is, I guess. I'm glad all of them were able to safely return home and be at peace there -- I know at the end of some of my vacations all I want to do is just be back home in my house, no matter how much I loved the trip. I'd guess that feeling is at least somewhat universal with a lot of folks. 

Today is hustle Tuesday, the day I have so much to do before the wife gets home and before I start work. Today also coincided with the delivery of a lot of Amazon stuff I'd ordered over the weekend, so in addition to doing my normal daily tasks I knew I'd have to bring in about 100 pounds of Amazon boxes (no, this isn't an exaggeration -- I'd ordered a 24-pack of V8, a 12-pack of Rockstars, two 26-pound bags of cat litter, and a 12-pound bag of cat food, in addition to other smaller items). 

I got up, I looked out the window to see the boxes were there, and went to the bathroom, where I planned to shower before going downstairs to bring the stuff in -- I would also need to take out the trash and recycling and get the mail, so when I went downstairs I was planning to do all of that at once. As I flushed the toilet and was planning to get into the shower, I heard the front door (maybe 20 feet from me) open and heard the boxes being brought in.

"Wife?" I asked, still somewhat groggy, naked, and standing at the top of the stairs. This was, in retrospect, a foolish decision, as if it were not my wife, I just let an intruder know that there was a half-asleep, naked, defenseless man at the top of the stairs. 

Yes, I was naked -- I was about to get into the shower. Keep up.

"My love," Daisy replied.

"Why are you home?"

"I saw the boxes being delivered on the camera and didn't know if you were going to get up or if you were going to sleep until 5:30 or 6, so I came home on my lunch to bring them in."

She came up the stairs to kiss me, then left and I got into the shower. My wife is an incredibly sweet person who always goes above and beyond the call of duty, because -- let me tell you -- if roles were reversed, there's no way my ass would be driving across town to bring in packages on my lunch hour if/when she was home and asleep, and then driving back across town to work for several more hours. But that just shows the difference between my wife and myself.

With those boxes, I am now (finally) fully restocked on essentials like cat food, coffee, and V8 (to support my two-can-a-day habit) and can breathe a little easier; I've been stressed about little things like that. I can now focus on bigger picture stuff, like taking care of the chores around the house that need to be done. 

Our dining room table is a wreck -- all sorts of stuff has been piled on it and around it for over the past year, with very little of it being removed. I've told the wife that I want to focus on getting that cleaned off, and focus on cleaning off all the stuff on the kitchen counters too, just doing a big sweep of the downstairs and deciding what we need and what we don't, and what can be thrown away/recycled or donated. But, that's a job we'll have to do together and one that will need to be done when we both have the time and energy for it. My contribution to the un-fucking of this house will be the clean sweep of my side of the closet for clothing donations -- something that I've put on the docket to do for myself this coming weekend. It's gotten to the point where I don't have enough hangers/space for all the stuff I have, so my overall goal is to pare it the fuck down and to be brutal in my cuts. There's stuff in there that I can confidently say I've only worn 2-3 times ever, and several pairs of shoes that have never even left the box they were purchased in. Some brutal de-cluttering is in order. Some of it will be painful to get rid of, but most of it will not. The more room I make in the closet, the more room I have to replace the stuff I remove with stuff I actually want and need. Eventually, anyway. I have definitely bought less clothing over the past year and a half since the pandemic started than probably any other period in my life, and keep in mind that I've still purchased probably 20 shirts, 30 pairs of underwear, and probably 10 or so pairs of pants/shorts in that time. So yeah, room has to be made -- out with the old, in with the new. Fat guys who frequent thrift stores are gonna love me. 

My parents' birthday presents have arrived at their beach house in NC, all except the tie-dye hoodie I purchased for my mother. That arrives on Monday, roughly. Their shared birthday is Friday. I can't really help shipping speeds when the stuff I order says it's Prime -- Prime is supposed to be 1-2 day shipping for everything, though it doesn't usually work out that way from what I've seen. 

My parents are old; they'll be 61 and 71 this year, respectively, with my mother being the younger of the two. I turn 40 next year. I'm already struggling with my own mortality, as I'm sure they are as well. As I have the means to help their lives suck a little bit less, I want them to know that and enjoy it. The hours I worked to pay for their birthday gifts is roughly equivalent to half a night of work for me. Bigger picture is that I have no problem doing that labor to make them feel a little happier in life and for them to know their son cares about them. If I ever have children -- and the jury is still out on whether that will ever happen for me or not -- I can only hope that when I reach old age, they'll still care about me and will send me little presents in the mail for my birthday.

To be fair, my parents also send me and Daisy presents for our respective birthdays as well. It's usually cookware or around-the-house goods that we need and use -- or they ask specifically what we'd like, I give them a rough idea, and they send either exactly what I/we were looking for or something very similar. For example, Daisy wanted an air popper for popcorn for her birthday this year. I was going to get it myself, but a few days before I did, my mother texted me and asked what she wanted, so I linked her to the air popper and they got it for her.

As an aside, Daisy thought I was going to get her an ice cream maker -- based on a 30-second conversation we'd had about one several weeks before in the middle of the night. 

"There's no way in hell I would've ever thought of that or remembered it," I told her. 

Daisy remembers little things like that. I generally do not. I remember facts and dates and obscure trivia-like information that would serve me well on a talk show panel or on Jeopardy!, but not so much in real life. 

Wednesday, August 18:

Working from home, day 321.

There's a lot of things I've glossed over in covering as of late, such as the ten year anniversary of living on my own after my break-up with Alley (that was Monday, as Facebook reminded me) as well as this week being eleven years ago that I first stepped into a classroom as an instructor, not a student. Time comes and goes, and sometimes it goes really quickly. I found a 120-page draft (nowhere near finished, of course) of a self-help book I began writing long before Daisy and I were even together, about entering and surviving graduate school. Like, helpful tips and stuff along those lines. I had completely forgotten about it and only vaguely remembered writing it when I was flipping through it. I may eventually finish it; it won't take that long, likely. But, that's an example of how fast time flies and how some things, even important things, tend to fall to the wayside as time goes on.

The White House announced yesterday that it's likely all of us who got the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines will need to get a third shot around the 8-month point, a booster of sorts, as scientific data is seeing that effectiveness rates are falling versus the new Delta variant. I will say I called this a long time ago and 100% expected this to happen. I expect we'll all be getting Covid shots every year, just like we all get flu shots every year now, and that within about five years it'll be a normal thing. I'm interested, in a morbid way, of seeing just how many Covid mutations/variants pop up over the course of the next five years or so, too. From a scientific perspective, you have to admit that it's fascinating. Even the flu has several variants every year, some stronger than others, and the flu vaccine is more effective some years than others (a few years back it was like 14% effective, which my doctor told me when I went to the doctor's office...for the flu). It's going to be interesting -- and sad -- to see how the world reacts if a newer mutation/variant becomes vaccine-resistant and sweeps the planet. I would not be surprised by that at this point -- keep in mind that while I try to be optimistic in a great many things, deep down in my black little heart I am a jaded asshole. 

Daisy is working from home today and tomorrow. It's good to have her here -- again, homebody -- to talk to and/or decompress a little with. People at her job are dropping like flies; one of her favorite coworkers left for a better job last week, and this week another one of her coworkers is leaving as well...to go work for the one who left. Daisy is now one of the only remaining people in her department still there now compared to when she started the job, which is slightly distressing for a job that does not generally have anywhere near as much turnover as some other positions.

One of my own employees texted me on Sunday night and basically told me the equivalent of "hey, thanks for the job and the help, I got a new job and I'm starting tomorrow, so where do I drop off my computer?"

It's the first time I've had an employee leave my team in several months -- and it stings a bit because he was actually a good employee who retained information well and actually wanted to be the best at what he did -- but there's not much I can do to keep someone when they get a new job, so...

It's just par for the course for the turnaround in that place. I've had more employees quit or get fired under my watch over the past five years in my current position than I currently have working for me. It is also with great irony that I must note that today -- August 18 -- is my 7th anniversary with the company. That's the day I started training and the like, and it's the day they list as my "hire date" (which isn't accurate as I was hired almost two months before, they just couldn't schedule me for a training class until mid-August). My first day on the floor as an agent -- 2nd shift, 3p-12a -- was the day after Labor Day in 2014. By Halloween that year I was running the "gate" (our shared box) solo and at great speed, and by a year later, I was on dayshift on the leadership track -- joining our executive escalations team and later taking it over as acting manager of it. By October 2016 I was the overnight teams' manager and have remained in that position ever since, meaning that yes, this October I'll "celebrate" five years in that position within the company. Ironically, that makes me one of the less-than-ten most/longest tenured in leadership at that company at this point, with only a handful of other operations managers and my executive director having a longer tenure in our operations' leadership. My executive director passed his ten-year point on Sunday, and made the comment that some people exist as an example not to follow, as of the 3650 days he's been employed (roughly), he's "worked almost all of them."

"Gross," my boss replied. "Do they at least give you a watch?"

The answer to that is, of course, no.

Thursday, August 19:

Working from home, day 322.

As Daisy is also working from home today, I let her know that I wanted to go to the gym tonight when she finished up her shift. Thursday is a prime night for me to go to the gym -- I don't usually like going on work nights, but for Thursdays it gets me all primed and ready to take on the world, and I get the endorphins flowing.

I have been more lax about the gym than I'd like, but most of that's because of stress from everything going on at work and around the house and because I'm usually pretty tired when I wake up for the day. However, I need to make a concerted effort to go to the gym even when I don't want to, and force myself to rebuild my endurance for working out. I miss the hard workouts I used to force myself through, where I'd soak my shirt through with sweat by the end of it and my muscles would ache, but I'd also feel like a million bucks afterward. Part of what I don't like about the gym is the environment -- there are so many people there almost every time we go, it feels like I'm getting too close to other people or they're getting too close to me, and I don't like that. I feel their eyes on me, I smell their stale sweat in the air. Not a fan. 

When we had a Planet Fitness membership, for all its flaws, the gym was open 24/7 and we could go pretty much anytime we wanted. There were nights it was busy but most of the time we were but two of maybe ten people in the entire complex. Our gym now is constantly crowded with meatheads, it pumps loud and annoying/grating music by bands like Five Flavor Fruit Punch (or whatever they're called) and the like, and generally feels sort of like a hostile environment. 

Anyway, this did not happen. The gym, I mean. 

When I woke up in the evening I was very fatigued. My whole body ached and I was starving. I have been noticing that a lot more as of late -- waking up hungry. It's about the only time I ever really have an appetite anymore -- when I first wake up in the afternoons. If I don't eat anything immediately, it usually goes away once I get up and start moving around, which is also harder than you might think. I've been achy and stiff recently. Part of that I can attribute to getting old and to full-body allergies (like, when the weather changes, as it's slowly been doing this week) but I really couldn't tell you why I've been so fatigued other than, I guess, work stress. I haven't been sleeping a lot when I used to be, and it always feels very difficult for me to do so these days, I guess. I'm starting to feel discouraged about that again, I think. I was sleeping so well for about a month and a half, and then gradually my body decided "nope, that's enough of that," and slowly began reverting back to only letting me sleep 4-6 hours at a time. I now need frequent naps during work again, when I hadn't needed that for a long time -- meaning, I take a nap on my lunch hour or otherwise there is absolutely the possibility/near-certainty I'll fall asleep at my desk, no matter how many things I have to do or how busy I am. 

I told the wife that I just didn't have the energy for it. Again. And then I went downstairs and got something to eat and watched TV. 

I don't know if it's my body getting used to the Metformin or what -- there was indeed a night and day difference before I started it to where I was afterwards -- but that extra energy I got and the ability to sleep longer and more restfully it gave me is all but gone now, and for fuck's sake I want and need it back. I suddenly felt like an actual person again, I was like "oh, so this is what real life is supposed to feel like, this is how people can have energy to like, go out and do things and exercise and run errands and clean everything and do yard work and have children and go on adventures with their children" and now it feels like I plateaued on that and am now slowly reverting back to being a lump with no energy who can barely sleep and feels like shit all the time. I guess I just don't understand how that can happen or why. I'm not depressed, my job is stressful (but no more stressful than it has been since I started working from home), and most of the time I'm more active and I've been eating far more cleanly. Yes, I'm slowly weaning myself back off the testosterone, but I've been doing that for months anyway. 

Like, did I pick up non-symptomatic Covid and that's what's killing my energy and sleep cycles? Did I get Delta'd? It's not like I would know if I did, if I'm non-symptomatic. Plus, I mean, vaccines. Again, it's all such a terrifying concept that I don't actually like thinking about any more than I have to. 

I also don't know if that I'm just getting to a true burnout point, and it's a slow roll to it. I'm not bored with my life, per se -- I love never having to leave the house unless it's my choice to do so -- working from home has been an amazing blessing, as have grocery delivery services and companies like Amazon (again, just like Walmart, a necessary evil in my eyes). I don't necessarily feel unfulfilled -- I've got a home I own, a very loving wife, three aging kitties, and my admittedly few hobbies and pastimes, like my comics and my writing and my (also aging) PS2 for any sort of real diversion.

So I don't know. Maybe I'm just going through a weird phase or something.

Friday, August 20: Day off; parents' birthday.

Saturday, August 21: Day off; late grandmother's birthday.

Once I got off work yesterday morning, a thunderstorm rolled through Omaha. It wasn't a bad storm by any means -- just some rain and light thunder, and no real wind to speak of. I called my parents to wish them a happy birthday, and let my mother know that her own present would likely be delayed until Monday (it was being shipped from California, and was in El Paso last night -- on its way to North Carolina). I then passed out after the call, as I told my mother at the end of it that I felt the dark grip of sleep taking me over, or something like that. I get loopy when I'm tired.

We were predicted to get some really nasty, damaging storms last night -- as I mentioned here earlier in the week. Luckily, they passed us by -- we heard a little thunder, saw a few flashes of lightning, etc, but that was really it. No wind, only hard rain for about 25 minutes, and then it all moved off. For the most part, the "first alert day" the local weather called for was a bust, at least for our part of the area. The sky did get really green for a long time though, but faded almost completely by the time it got dark. We're supposed to fight off possible storms for the next four days straight, as there are chances of them each day...but this morning it's beautiful, in the 70s, and bright/sunny -- easily the most beautiful morning so far this month.

Today starts, as mentioned before, the purging of my closet. I spent about an hour in there this morning and filled three bags in that hour full of stuff to get rid of, and I'm only a little more than 1/3 done probably. Hampering the job (pun intended) is the fact that I need to reorganize everything too, now that I have better/more space to it, and for some of that stuff I'm absolutely keeping...it smells old and dusty and, well, like a closet...so, I need to re-wash a lot of it to freshen it up and re-assess. What I thought would be an hour or two's worth of work has turned into probably 3-5 hours, not counting the time it'll take to do the multiple loads of laundry for it. It's a pretty labor-intensive process, it turns out. 

It's fine; it needs to be done. I told Daisy it was very important for me to do it for my own mental headspace, and believe me, once we drop off the bags at Goodwill (or wherever) it'll feel really good and I will feel like I've accomplished a task that I've been meaning to do since before the pandemic hit. We also need to drop off our glass for recycling today too, and get the oil changed in the car. 

Today is also my late grandmother's birthday. She would have been 94, had she not died in the very beginning of 2018. As such, August 21 is always a strange, bittersweet day for me. The woman practically raised me, and (in my own view) led a very tragic, unfulfilled life. She dropped out of school in the 9th or 10th grade to help run the family farm after her father died, she was married and pregnant by nineteen, she had seven children over the span of eighteen years, her husband had a heart attack and died in a grocery store when she was 55 -- younger than my own mother is now -- and she lived another 35 years without him and without remarrying. I don't know that my grandmother ever drank a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette (I'm told she never did, but I mean, the family likely wears rose-colored glasses). My grandfather, a military man who came home from World War II to become a factory worker and provide for his family, was the love of her life, and she never attempted -- again, to my knowledge -- to ever move on romantically. Instead, she slowly became a hoarder and began to fill their shared, master bedroom with trash and junk, to the point where you could barely even walk six feet into it after a while. When my aunt (her youngest daughter) moved out of the house in the mid-80s, she took over my aunt's old room to sleep in and began filling it with junk as well. By the late 90s she'd begun sleeping on the couch in the living room. By the late 2000s, when my other aunts and uncles had secured her a new trailer to live in at the bottom of the farm's driveway and had cleaned out the other house, I saw the two rooms emptied for the first time in my life and was shocked about what was in there and what wasn't in there. 

The last time I saw my grandmother alive was in September 2017, when Daisy and I drove back to WV to visit the family and my parents. She got to meet Daisy for the first and only time over that visit -- something that was very important to me -- and three months later she was dead. She knew that it was the last time she would see me as well; she told me then that she understood that and knew that I would never be able to afford to come back a few months later for her funeral, as she knew her time was almost up, and gave me her blessing that it was okay.  On my birthday that year, she called and left me a message on my phone, telling me she missed me and loved me and hoped I had a happy birthday. I meant to call her back but very regrettably never did, and she was dead two weeks later. It haunts me that I didn't get the chance to speak to her again.

She told me as a kid that she always wanted to be buried in a pink dress. I don't know if they actually buried her in a pink dress or not, or if that was just something she thought was amusing to tell me -- she'd always thought to an extent, given her health problems over the years (at least two strokes, osteoporosis, a mild heart attack, a pacemaker, etc) that she was going to die at any time. By the time I was a teenager, she'd lost most of her teeth -- she had two top teeth left; the rest had fallen out, and she didn't wear dentures -- and her entire life that I'd known her, she'd worn very thick bifocal glasses as her eyes were terrible. However, she'd had cataract surgery a year or two before she'd died, and she could see much better after that -- so she said. 

Her body is buried on top of the hill in the cemetery in the little town I grew up in outside of Morgantown -- next to my grandfather, who'd been there for 35 years already. I've not been to her grave since she was laid to rest (as I have not been back to WV since then) but if we do get to go back home in October, that's one of my planned stops. 

Sunday, August 22:

Working from home, day 323.

The weekend flew by far too quickly. I do at least have the comfort of knowing that the Labor Day holiday is coming up, and with it I get two extra nights off work thanks to a bit of deft PTO balancing and my work schedule. I've tried to warn the crew and help prepare the scheduling for the holiday weekend, but I don't really think most people have paid attention or have noticed. I have some volunteers already, but only 2-3, and we'll likely need about triple that in order to take care of actual business at work over the holiday weekend. If they don't get more people, oh well, I've made my efforts to take care of staffing, and my ass will be out of office as I've already worked two other holidays this year. 

In a longform email detailing my coaching efforts across the board for my agents (something I'm supposed to do weekly, but generally end up doing about 1-2 times a month because I'm constantly swamped, I brought my concerns to my leadership about how I have so many people reporting to me and how it's very hard to keep track of them, who they are, what they're supposed to be doing, etc -- on a 24/7/365 basis with very little support. I've brought these concerns up to both of my directors before and was summarily waved off with little fanfare. I will point out that I am older than both of my directors and have been working there longer in this program than either of them have as well. I am not trying to piss and moan, but I'm trying to get them to address my legitimate concerns about the structure of our program as well as more specifically about how if feels like I'm doing the work of a director without the title or paycheck.

I do not actually want to be a director. With the title comes a lot of bullshit that I do not want to deal with or be responsible for. I'm also not trying to grab power or angle for a raise -- though I wouldn't object to one if it were offered -- I just want to be heard and I want the problems I bring to their attention addressed in one fashion or another, not just dismissed. I am not an overall patient person, but I have tried to be incredibly patient with our leadership in my job, because I know there's likely more going on behind the scenes than I know -- but on the other side of that coin, as one of my coworkers told me last week, "[Company] is the land of use and abuse." And, sadly, he's really not wrong.

So we'll see what comes of it. I'd hate to have to take it to my executive director because nobody else wants to give me the time of day on my concerns, but I won't hesitate for a moment to do so. Brandon don't play. 

In other news, after multiple hours of work and filling three full, heavy garbage bags with my clothing, I can successfully now say that I have completed Operation: Gut the Closet and have donated over 100 pounds of old shirts, pants, underwear, socks, shoes, and sleepwears to Goodwill. In doing so I found probably 20-30 other things I'll end up donating sooner or later as well, including a few older jackets/coats and some pajama pants that I didn't really need to keep but ended up keeping as we'd already taken the load of stuff over there. It feels really good. 

Daisy rescued a few of my old tie-dye shirts and the like to re-use as gym clothing, but Daisy desperately needs to go through her own stuff as well. I watch very carefully what she actually wears and I know all of it intimately as I do the laundry -- Daisy wears approximately 5% of the clothing she owns. The rest exists in piles and boxes and in great heaps in various places of the upstairs of the house. Part of the reason I hope that her job -- once the new firm takes over and her position is upgraded -- lets her be a 100% work-at-home employee is because I want her to realize she only wears 5% of her clothing, and I want her to reduce her overall collection by about 25-30%. I don't think this is unreasonable. The sheer amount of stuff I've sacrificed since we have been together and moved into this house is well over 50-60% of everything I've ever owned. I sold or threw away or donated so much of everything I owned, not just clothing, to be able to have the two of us comfortably live in this house without clutter everywhere. I don't think asking her to get rid of 25-30% of just her clothing -- most of which she hasn't worn since we moved into this house -- is too much to ask. 

Am I being unreasonable? Am I being an asshole? I'm not trying to be. I just want us to not focus so much on possessions and I want the house to look like a normal house, without boxes and bags and clothing piled everywhere. It's so disgusting and unnatural to me, the man who has a place for everything, a correct place for everything, and everything is in its place. There are very few things I keep around for sentimental reasons or because I think they look neat or might eventually be useful. If I don't need something and don't have a use for it at present time, it gets tossed. If I need it later I go buy a new one. It is very difficult sometimes for me to live with someone who does not think the same way I do about stuff like that. I'm not criticizing Daisy -- far from it. I'm saying she sees things differently than I do. We're very different people. 

We got the oil changed on her car yesterday as well -- she told me on Friday that it was flashing the "low oil" light at her, which is weird because, well, it's not like we are lax on oil changes (when we took it in yesterday it wasn't yet due for another 18 miles, so, go Daisy) and she did have the leaking oil pan fixed/replaced a few months back. I checked the oil yesterday morning with the dipstick and...well, it appeared that she didn't have any. WTF. I put a good quart or two in just to make sure we'd be able to get to the shop okay, and also noticed that her coolant level was way below the low point. We filled that up too, and filled up her washer fluid (also almost empty) and $60 later, we had an oil change with brand new high-mileage synthetic. Still, WTF, for the car to be almost completely out of oil, she must be burning it off somehow/somewhere. Aside from our weekly errands and her going to-and-from work, the car doesn't get driven anywhere near as much as it used to before the pandemic. We did take it to South Dakota and back, but we didn't have any issues there whatsoever either, so...yeah, I don't know, I got nothin'. I'm generally good with cars and can tell what's up with them, but I'm sort of at a loss on this one.

At least she works from home the next two days.

Back to work for me tonight. I already can't wait until morning.

Monday, August 23:

Working from home, day 324.

Last night at work was quiet, which I'm thankful for because I was completely exhausted by the time I got off work this morning. I don't know what it was, but the need for sleep overtook me far more than it normally would have, and I literally passed out in my chair about 25 minutes after finishing work -- before Daisy was really up and about and getting ready for her own day, even. I moved to the bed around noon and slept for another three and a half hours there, too, so I got something like 7.5 hours of sleep. 

I don't know what's going on with my body -- there are days I'll be full of energy and raring to go, to do everything under the sun, to make everything happen, and then there are days where it feels like I'm walking through a fog and can barely stay awake, and everything hurts when I move, etc. I had so much energy on Saturday, and got so much accomplished -- and yesterday I was mostly fine too. Last night and this morning it's like I'm running on fumes and nothing really helped. This evening I'm okay -- fair-to-middlin' I suppose, but I also look at the pile of freshly-washed/refreshed clothing I need to insert back into my closet in an organized fashion, something that will easily take a half hour, if not more, and immediately get fatigued.

Maybe I just need a break. It's only been a little over a month since we got back from South Dakota and it feels like it was a year ago. 

Tuesday, August 24: Working from home, day 325. 

Wednesday, August 25: Working from home, day 326.

The past few days have been very trying on my emotional and physical sensibilities. I've been attempting to keep my chin up as much as possible -- and again, I'm not depressed -- but it does feel like the world is throwing a lot at me in an attempt to make me depressed. 

Work has not been pleasant, but it's not been especially unpleasant either (I'm really hoping I'm not speaking too soon on that, and that when I start my shift tonight it's not horrifying), but it has been tiring and draining. It seems that all I'm doing is slogging through each night trying to do some good, and occasionally getting a little gratitude for it, but my primary goal every night is to just get through it and get to the weekend...a weekend that is far too short and disappears in a blink of the eye. They keep adding new people to my team when I can't track everyone I have now (I believe my total is now up to 24 people) and honestly, I don't know if their overall back-end goal is to try to get me to quit, or what -- because that's not happening. As my own director told me, he's going down with the ship, and this is a sentiment I echo as well. They can give me as many people as they want, but my "effort levels" of sorts aren't going to change. I'm going to do what I can as I can do it much per the usual, and if they don't like that or don't feel that I'm doing enough...well, they can either address my concerns, compensate me better monetarily and promote me to where my workload actually makes sense based on the salary I'd make after said promotion...orrrrrr they can fire me; I'll take their severance package to be done with that place, and they can fend for themselves. At the end of the day, as I've said here before (and as I tell all of my employees when they get too stressed about it themselves), it's just a job.

I've also had a strange diet for the past few days, which is interesting because it's three years ago this week, I believe, that I became vegetarian. I mentioned above my daily diet of healthy trail mix, salads or other vegetables, V8, basic proteins in the form of nuts, cheeses, and vegetarian/vegan meat substitutes, and (sparingly) snacky things like popcorn or chips/crackers. If I have any bread products they're either low-carb tortillas or low-carb, high-fiber wraps, and occasionally a sandwich or two on the lowest-carb bread I can find. 

But I want pizza -- real pizza. I desperately want pasta and ramen. I even more desperately want stuff like fried rice, fries with gravy, (vegan) burgers on buns made from regular bread, giant sub sandwiches, calzones, (vegan) cheesesteaks covered in cheese, peppers, and onions, and other greasy things. I can't have any of them -- or if I do, I can only have them very, very rarely -- because I have to watch everything I put into my body due to my diabetes. It is a constant, sometimes very frustrating battle. I can't eat apples and bananas anymore -- too much sugar. Most fruit juices are off the table too. Even peanut butter is iffy, and basically considered a treat to be consumed only when I really haven't had anything sugary or carby for the day already. 

I have to get this weight off me, though. If I have to push myself harder and harder to do it and make a lot more sacrifices so that I can make the diabetes go away, then that's what I'm going to have to do. 

Daisy says she's proud of me and that I'm doing well -- really well on my new diet -- and sometimes, I feel like I am. Most of the time, I feel like I'm waiting to see some results that never really materialize, and then I end up hating myself for wanting the foods I want when I want them. It's just so frustrating. I like being healthy, and I like eating healthily, but my weight and diabetes has robbed me of one of the few joys I had left in life, and that was eating for pleasure. As in, being able to be like "yes, that sounds good, I want that, I will feel better after I eat it" and then consuming it without worry or repercussion. 

One of my other joys is about to end soon too, as I am now coming up on the last few bottles of vape juice I have left, the stuff I socked away months or years ago. I have four bottles left, which will last me a few more weeks at most -- and then I have two bottles of my favorite flavor that I purchased nicotine-free to get me off the nicotine side of it and break my dependency before I'm completely done. 

As mentioned before, I've wanted to be done with vaping for a long time -- as long as I wanted to be done with smoking. I quit smoking in 2016, and afterwards felt amazing (a few months down the road, of course, once all of the tar and the like had worked its way out of my system) and now, after all my favorite juice suppliers have closed their doors (meaning, I can't get those juices anymore) I'm sunsetting my habit, so to speak.

Be advised -- there are absolutely other places I could get juice from, and absolutely other places online I could order it from -- but I just want to be done with the habit of it, I want to be done with the daily grind of it. It was one of my New Year's Resolutions, as you'll recall, and I'm sticking to it. Once I'm done, and everything is used and I've finished...everything I have left related to it, including devices, peripherals, etc etc -- will all either be trashed or given away just to get it out of my house and away from me, so that I'm no longer tempted to pick up the habit again or try to find some way to continue it.  In time, I'm sure, I'll view it as I now view cigarettes -- something I never want to touch or have around me ever again. I'm disgusted by cigarettes now, by the mere thought of them, disgusted that I sucked so much smoke down into my lungs for fifteen years on the daily, sometimes close to two packs a day. I actually can't even fathom how I did that now, or why, and am stunned at the chemical dependence I had to it. 

However...coffee though -- nobody's taking my caffeine from me. I've given up most of the shit food, almost all sugars, and I'll now be getting rid of nicotine, but you'll pry my coffee cup or my cases of sugar-free Rockstar/Reign from my dead hands when it's all said and done. I have no desire to ever get rid of caffeine. 

Thursday, August 26:

Working from home, day 327.

School Anniversary.

Last night, I placed a Walmart delivery order I've been putting off for a few days -- close to a week, actually. I'm trying to save money, and Daisy and I have both been trying to eat through what's in the house as much as humanly possible -- Delta has us troubled and we're trying to avoid stores and crowds. This goes double for where we are in Nebraska, where nobody wears masks anywhere anymore and so many people think the virus is a political hoax that the media is ramping up to make it sound far worse than it actually is. Yeah, that may be the case in some scenarios, but still...

I'm sorry, I'd rather not take any more chances than I have to. As I've said before, I'm perfectly happy never leaving the house unless I have to and getting all my groceries and household supplies delivered to my doorstep -- fuck society, fuck the outside world, I have the internet. 

Stuff like this has made me seriously question the feasibility and intelligence of our planned trip to West Virginia in October. My parents -- who are fully vaccinated and aren't stupid -- told me on the phone last week that Covid is skyrocketing there again, nobody's wearing masks (and for those people who do, everyone else looks at them like they're insane) and a good chunk of the population thinks masks and vaccinations are taking away people's personal freedoms. I have so many relatives I want to see when I'm back home, but I likely won't because they're anti-vaccine and anti-science and remain unvaccinated and unmasked...and I'm sorry, I just won't be putting myself in that situation again. I am so very disappointed in a lot of my extended family back home that I can't really accurately put it into words. 

I'm shocked when I really shouldn't be. I love my home state, and there are many people there I love as well, but it's been slowly dying since the 90s and its population is getting dumber and dumber by the year -- it's radicalized stupidity. You know, like how they say (and I'm being facetious here) that radical Muslims radicalize others and whip them up into a fervor until they're ready to jihad? Yeah, it's like that in West Virginia, but with the hillbillies and the uneducated. Stupid breeds more stupid, hand in hand with its partner-in-crime, willful ignorance. In fifteen years or so I expect West Virginia to be mostly retaken by the wilds, because outside of the cities there won't be jobs, there won't be people, there won't be anyone left because they've all died of whatever Covid variant is around by that point -- and I still expect, if you were to drive through the state and pass the rundown, unkept homes and empty neighborhoods after what the history books will likely call "the idiots' extinction," you'll still see TRUMP 2020 flags in the yards and hanging from front-porch flagpoles. 

Anyway.

In other news, August 26 holds a special place for me in my own personal history. It is generally the day, as a kid, that schools would re-enter session. Some years it was the 24th, some years the 27th, etc -- and as I entered high school and college it kept getting pushed back earlier, like around the 20th or 19th, but as a kid, the 26th was more often than not back-to-school day. 

It's hard for me now to remember what back-to-school day was like in the 90s as I rapidly approach age 40, but I do remember it being somewhat jarring a lot of the time. There was always a twinge of excitement for new opportunities, for seeing friends again, to show off your new clothing that your parents (in my case, my mother) got you for the year, or to show off your new backpack, or sunglasses, or whatever.

That's what I remember more than most other stuff about going back to school -- being proud of how I looked (ironic, isn't it?). One year -- had to be 96 or 97, likely -- I was so proud of the tie-dye Star Wars shirt and black, round Lennon sunglasses I'd purchased at one of the downtown shops that I couldn't wait to show them off to everyone. They were both proudly purchased with my own money from my own summer job, which was covering a paper route for one of my friends while he was at the beach for the summer months. I used to think I was so cool in my tie-dye, sunglasses, and my fresh new Airwalk suede sneakers. 

The sunglasses quickly broke and got bent up, but that Star Wars tie-dye shirt -- depicting the battle over Endor, from Return of the Jedi -- I wore until I was well into college before it eventually got so worn and so thin in its fabric that it legitimately began falling apart and I had to toss it. The suede Airwalks? I wore them off and on throughout high school and when they began to wear down after several years, they became my backyard "mowing" shoes before they were eventually tossed.

In high school, I...stopped caring about this sort of thing that much, I guess. I was gaining weight pretty rapidly in my high school years, and it was that really awkward time in the late 90s when fat-people clothing...well, wasn't really everywhere or available yet, even in places like Walmart or Kmart, and ordering clothes off the internet was basically unheard of -- ordering pretty much anything off the internet in the late 90s was almost unheard of; the internet as we know it today was basically in its infancy, and wouldn't begin to become what it is now for several more years. So, I was rapidly growing out of my clothing, and what I wasn't growing out of was breaking down quickly after so many years of use. I think until 2000 or so, I only owned maybe three pairs of jeans, and they were all uncomfortable and tight -- hardly a pleasure to wear. I could fit into 2XL shirts comfortably, though (oh, those were the days...) so that wasn't usually a problem. When the anime series Robotech got remastered around 1999-2000 or so and finally got a DVD release and some publicity, I bought several Robotech t-shirts that I wore, well...everywhere -- well into college.

Of course, I was also having my musical awakening during this time too, so I had a few KMFDM shirts, an Iron Maiden shirt, my NOFX, Misfits, and Dead Kennedys shirts (the latter two of which I've replaced not once but twice now in my adult years after the older ones have fallen apart), etc. I was very much in my punk-rock-and-metal phase. I remember scouring the clearance racks at Suncoast Video, National Record Mart, and Camelot Music -- as well as places like Spencer Gifts and Gadzooks -- to find new pop-culture and nerd apparel. 

It was a fun time. I miss the innocence of the 90s, with our roaring economy, no pandemics, and no real climate change to speak of....

Friday, August 27: Day off. Payday for me.

Saturday, August 28: Day off.

I received an email this morning -- two days after writing about it above -- that the vape juice supplier  I loved, the one that shut its doors and stopped making its juice back in March...was back in the business and was able to sell juice again, legally, federally approved through the mail, all on the up-and-up. The juice I loved, the juice I could no longer get.

I...am intensely conflicted. 

On one hand, as I mentioned above, I want to be done with it, done and over with it -- cutting the cord, breaking the chain, etc. On the other hand I have far more supplies and the like than I ever could've hoped to use before all of my juices dried up, and it is such a waste of a lot of money (I'm talking probably $100-200 or more) to just throw it all in the trash -- literally into the trash, as it's not like I can really resell it nor do I know anyone who would buy it for anything near what I paid for it. I probably have $60 worth of unused coils for tanks, another $30-50 in unused rebuildables and cotton, and various other tools and mods that would just be, well, tossed. I really don't want to just throw money into the trash can. At the same time I don't want to be bound to this ball and chain forever.

I did not buy any of the juice this morning, but that's only because at this juncture, as they're just opening back up, their supplies are limited and the flavor I use was momentarily out of stock -- even in zero nicotine. When it comes back into stock...that will be the real test. I don't know yet what I will do. What I do know for certain is that I'm not going to get more "parts" ever again -- if a mod dies, it dies, and it gets tossed into the trash. If batteries die and burn out, tossed. If I'm out of coils and a tank becomes useless, oh well, into the trash it'll go too. But with juice available again, my juice, it's a completely different ballgame. I'm not asking y'all for advice or anything, I'm just...frustrated that this is the way it's gotta be at the moment. It throws a big wrench into the works that I just wasn't expecting, and it upsets me.

We have not left the house this weekend. I didn't really plan to. It's almost 100 degrees outside and it has been close to that every day for the past week. Gone are the nice, high-in-the-70s temperatures we had a while back; this week has been the brutal hell of multiple heat advisories during the day coupled with a severe thunderstorm almost every night somewhere in the area. Last night, for example, there were storms rolling through with 60-70mph winds and golf-ball-sized hail, and they just missed my part of town by maybe five miles or so. There was another really close lightning strike though, somewhere within a half mile of me. More storms are predicted, again, for the overnight hours tonight.

What have I done this weekend, then? Truthfully, as little as possible. I did some laundry yesterday, I got the Walmart order delivered last night and an Amazon order delivered this afternoon. There's nothing else I really need to do or want to do, and it's now too late in the evening for us to go to the gym (on Friday and Saturday nights, for some reason, it closes down at 9). Because of the order deliveries, we don't really need groceries, and Daisy and I had a late lunch of her famous homemade vegetable fried rice (I had a reduced amount because diabetes) so we're not even hungry, really. 

Anyway, moving on.

I've been trying to be more of an... ahem... grown up recently? I guess? It's not an exact science and it's not even something that I've been actively pursuing, just something I've noticed I'm doing as I get older. I find it really hard to explain or even pinpoint how or why, but I can give examples -- with last weekend's cleaning-out of the closet a good one. In that cleaning I realized that I had a lot of clothing and accessories that, really, I would expect people half my age to be wearing. I love comic books, video games, and other nerdery as much as a twenty-year-old would, but nearing age forty, not every other t-shirt has to be nerd-centric in my wardrobe. I got rid of a bunch of stuff that was plastered with comic book or video-game related stuff -- again, fat nerdy guys who go thrift-store shopping are gonna love me -- and found that what I had left was a lot of...normal clothing. Plain tees, in multiple colors, both crew and v-neck. Button-up shirts both short and long-sleeved. Polos. 

I do have a lot of music t-shirts though. You know how people get tattoos on their shoulder/bicep area as the "socially acceptable tattoo zone" or whatever? That's what my music shirts are to me. They're one of the few things I hold onto because I don't believe music is something that you can really become too mature or adult for (in most cases, anyway). I therefore have my Depeche Mode shirts, my Smiths and Morrissey shirts, but also my Judas Priest and KMFDM shirts -- for balance, of course. 

I do still have a lot of nerd shirts, though; I just got rid of about half of them. And my hoodies I left as-is -- they're not going anywhere, and about half of them are nerdy. I have a S.T.A.R. Labs hoodie, a Capsule Corp. hoodie, a Slytherin crest hoodie, etc. It's well-established I'm a nerd, but I don't have to proclaim it with every piece of clothing anymore, as I felt the need to do when I was much younger. My mother used to hate clothes-shopping with me because all of the nice shirts she picked out I shot down because they didn't have any logos or pictures on them -- they were plain shirts and to me, there was no point in that -- clothing had to proclaim a message or it was pointless, you might as well just be a faceless nobody. 

Oh, how young I once was, I guess. Now my favorite shirts in my collection are my plain ones that are soft and comfortable yet still nice. 

Am I old now?

Well, yes. 

One of my friends in grad school -- over ten years ago now -- was in his late 30s then (which would put him at very nearly age fifty now). He was by far the oldest of us grad students in our MFA class, and was a nonfiction essayist. I was 27 when I started grad school, and of course I was way more into dressing like a walking nerd billboard then than I am now, because I wanted to be the cool professor. He told me something I'll always remember, but I can't remember his exact phrasing of it -- something about how I should enjoy it now, because once I hit age 30, I needed to give all that stuff up, get rid of the comic book and band t-shirts, get my shit together, and dress like an adult. 

A part of that I took great offense to, to be honest with you. I don't think there's a set age that someone has to change who they are and/or change their personality or how they dress. I don't think that's ever really necessary to do as a conscious thing, because -- believe me -- as you get older and more mature/wise, that'll mostly come on its own. Part of it I took offense to because I was like dude, we're colleagues, and I would even consider us friends, but you don't know me and your statement makes you sound like an elitist, stuffy old asshole. 

At age 38, though, I have to admit that he may have had a small sliver of a point. I spent my twenties trying to look cool, sound cool, act cool -- growing my hair long, trying to get the longest, thickest beard, the darkest sunglasses, drink the most hipster beers that you'd never heard of -- trying to make a name and a reputation for myself with my appearance and demeanor that there was no way I was ever (realistically) going to have or rightfully earn -- it was putting on masks and trying to be someone I really wasn't. At age 38, I now realize that I was, and am, a pretty boring person with a peculiar sense of humor and some moderately decent writing abilities -- and not much else. 

Well, I'm a good husband too, I guess. And a good manager of people. And I suppose I'm a good cat dad. But would I list those things as personality-defining characteristics? I don't know.

My point is, at age 38 I don't give a shit about being cool anymore, and definitely don't care to draw attention to myself or be looked upon as a role model or anything of that nature, that's for damn sure. So now my mission is, I guess, to just be normal and fade into the background. I've seen myself as an old man for years, and pretty soon I'm actually going to be one -- I've got the graying hair and beard to prove it. I still want to look and feel nice, and not like a hobo or anything, but I don't have anyone to impress anymore. Daisy's the only person in my life I feel the need to impress, and I could be a quadruple amputee burn victim with brain damage and she'd still love me, so I don't think I have anything to worry about there. 

I've noticed a drastic change in how I view a lot of aesthetics as of late, too. For example, I used to want the weirdest, flashiest glasses or sunglasses possible to accessorize with a lot of my odd fashions. Now I tend to gravitate more towards the normal looks and the most functional -- subtle browline styles, square black frames (like Buddy Holly-style), and my only real deviation from that is my aviators -- see picture at the top of this post. Even those aren't really eccentric, though. Payne Glasses had a "double rewards points" today-only sale, and I purchased two pairs of very sensible glasses I'd had my eyes on for a bit.

I used to want a huge, extravagant house with a giant kitchen and bathrooms with whirlpool tubs and big, open walk-in showers and the like -- now I just want somewhere utilitarian, with enough space to do with what I choose, and the rest as comfortability. I would still like a giant island in our kitchen, though. I'll make sure our next house has that. 

I used to love flashy sports cars from the 70s and 80s....okay, I still love flashy sports cars from the 70s and 80s, but they're not like, a prerequisite for my next vehicle or anything. I told Daisy I want the next vehicle I own to be small and cheap and basic, like a Mitsubishi Mirage or a Nissan Versa, so that it doesn't take forever to pay off and if it gives me a lot of mechanical or reliability issues, I can trade it for something else of that ilk. Would I like an old Ram Charger or Bronco (old or new)? Yeah, but that's not exactly realistic for where we live now. I probably won't get another vehicle until we live in a house with a two-car garage.

Speaking of that... 

Long term goals, as I've told Daisy before, are to:

1. Get the fuck out of the midwest if at all possible -- move to a coastline somewhere, and barring that --

2. Move to a one-story ranch home, with a basement and two car garage, out in the country but close enough to a metro area (like Omaha or comparable city) -- somewhere flat with no goddamn trees close to the house. 

I told her I wanted to be far enough away from a metro area that nobody can be around us anywhere close and no cable/satellite providers could give us internet -- we'd get Elon Musk's Starlink (or whatever it is he calls it) or get cellular internet service through our phone plans and that would be the end of it. I've mentioned this before in the past here in these posts here and there. 

One of the biggest parts about getting older is that I have a true disdain and dislike of having to deal with other people. I'm pretty much done with boomers -- our parents are fine but I don't need or want to know any other ones, they're almost all sheeplike Trump supporters anyway who don't want to mask up or get the vaccines -- and Generation X these days, as they get older, have become almost as useless and haven't attempted to fix society, they're just nihilistic about it. Millennials are entitled assholes for the most part, and everyone in the younger generations following, the Gen Z-ers or whatever they want to call themselves, are too self-absorbed and too stupid to care or to take their eyes off their smartphones long enough to look up and see just how fucked the world is.  

And here I am with my jeans and khakis and simple shirts without comic book logos on them, wearing sensible glasses and comfortable, also-sensible shoes, watching the world burn down around me (sometimes literally; take a look at those wildfires these days) and hoping that society doesn't fully collapse -- after all, I still have medications I need to take every day and those groceries and household supplies aren't going to deliver themselves to my doorstep. 

Sunday, August 29:

Working from home, day 328.

The storms rolled in around 2am; they were mild, but gave some pleasant thunder and some good, hard rain to the area. All of their strength petered out before hitting Omaha proper, which is good -- I'd rather not have to pay hundreds of dollars to get another downed or cracked tree taken care of. 

Speaking of money, we, uh....don't really have to worry about money for a bit.

This is a delicate subject that I may have touched on here a time or two in the past, but haven't really mentioned much as of late -- in October 2017, shortly after our return from our last visit to West Virginia, Daisy got rear-ended pretty hard at an intersection across town. It did a few grand's worth of damage to our car (which was quickly fixed), but it messed Daisy up in her back and neck and caused what is now likely permanent nerve damage and a herniated/compressed disc. I'm glossing over a lot of it because I don't know exact details but also because they're not important to the story -- main point is, she was in a lot of pain for many months, and went through several different types of treatments to help her regain full mobility and lessen her daily pain levels, with fair-to-middlin' but overall stopgap levels of success. Because of that, and because the other driver was completely at fault, for the past three-and-a-half years -- but especially this past year now that we've had a lot more home-time due to Covid-19, she's been working her a settlement claim with the other driver's insurance company -- basically to get as much monetary compensation as possible for medical bill coverage and pain-and-suffering. 

The cutoff point for that claim to be filed was four years from the date of the accident, which is coming up (again, October), so for the past couple of months she was working very diligently to wrap it up and get it settled. Two years ago she and I went to see a lawyer who was interested in taking up the personal injury case, but we ultimately decided against it. About two months ago she spoke to another lawyer who gave her some possible rough figures, but the risks involved were too high and she decided against it then, too. Last week, finally, with all the paperwork complete and submitted, and after multiple back-and-forth offers on differences and pressing to get as much as possible on her own, I am happy to say that Daisy finally settled the case, got the outstanding medical and physical therapy bills covered, and received the rest in a lump sum settlement. 

And it...it is not a small amount of money.

Don't get me wrong, it's not life-changing, swimming-pools-and-movie-stars money or anything, but it's enough. I'm not going to talk about amounts here, but it's significant, and were we to need a tree removed or minor (or even some major) home repairs done due to any future storm damage or what have you... we wouldn't have to worry about being able to afford it. I'll just put it that way.

We do have plans for the money, of course; we'll be replenishing our savings account and paying down some debts -- it won't be wasted. The claim had been one of our biggest stressors for some time, and to now have it removed from our proverbial shoulders feels great. 

However, it's not all wine and roses -- Daisy's health problems from the accident still exist, and probably will to some extent for the rest of her life. They haven't lessened a lot since the accident, only partially and only enough to make chronic pain a not 100% constant thing, but still fairly frequent. She still experiences tingling and numbness in her arms due to the nerve damage and she still has some spine, shoulder, and neck issues. She may or may not eventually need a neck surgery to address the neck problems, though that will remain to be seen in the coming years. Obviously, we're hoping that's not the case.

Through it all I've been as supportive of her as possible and have been her biggest cheerleader, through everything from the early doctor appointments after it happened (when I could be there, anyway), to late night logistics discussions about how much to fight for and what amounts we'd deem reasonable to settle for, to helping her proofread and edit the claims rebuttals she sent in multiple times. As her husband, I also saw it as my duty to be her steady hand, to keep reminding her despite her anxiety that she needed to get this done to rid herself of the burden and stress it caused her. 

"[Daisy]," I told her, once she had the final check in hand, "It's over. It's done. It's taken care of."

Sometimes the small victories seem to be the most important ones, and sometimes it's the large ones. This one was a large one. And even though she may not see it as an overwhelming victory, it is one. It took almost the full four years to get where my wife is today -- victorious, with a settled claim and a righteous amount of pain-and-suffering money from it. But it is bittersweet. A settled claim and cash in hand doesn't magically resolve the health issues, nor does it lessen them. It also doesn't make them any easier to deal with. And it's not like she or I can magically quit our jobs -- life goes on much the same today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. At most we'll be able to give each other a little bit more lavish of a Christmas this year, perhaps, but not much else at all is going to change other than we'll have less debt and some savings in the bank again. 

That in itself is a good feeling, of course. 

Monday, August 30:

Working from home, day 329.

I started, in earnest, on the novel last night.

It's rough, I'm not going to lie. The writing, I mean, not in a "oh woe is me, it's so hard" sort of way. It's very clearly a rough draft. 

I know where the plot is going to go, but getting it there? That's a completely other story. For those of you who have never attempted to write a novel, setting the scene and starting the story can be the most difficult part. You have to be able to hook the reader in with a solid, gripping first few pages, or they'll lose interest and not continue reading. I don't know how many library books I checked out as a child that I read the first chapter or two of and was like "I can't read any more of this horseshit, this is dumb" and moved on to the next book. 

Actually there's a lot of books I felt that way about in college and in grad school as well, but was forced to read them to, y'know, graduate.

Before I started on the novel I set several goals for myself, all of which I completed:

1. redo some of the story notes, add more background for the characters, and delete a few of them to trim down any extra exposition -- narrow the plot structure and know who the characters are and who they're going to be, and fill in the gaps as I write their roles

2. turn off all distractions -- email, Facebook, Twitter, music

3. write for at least 30 minutes, uninterrupted, no matter what comes out -- editing can come later.

I ended up writing for 57 minutes -- three pages, single-spaced. 1,257 words, 6,655 characters. The first chapter of the novel. It sets the stage of the story, sets the narrative pace, and sets the story in motion. The novel will have multiple first-person narrators, as well as possibly a third-person omniscient narrator as well in some sections -- I am not sure how I'll go about that yet.

The writing came freely and easily, as if I were flexing a muscle I hadn't used in years. Now mind you, obviously, I write here all the time.  It's not like I haven't written anything in years. But it is the first time I've written fiction in many, many years. Again, I don't think I'm great at it, but time will tell. Maybe this novel will end up being great. 

The main thing is to keep going.

Tuesday, August 31:

Working from home, day 330.

And so, we've reached the end of another eventful month.

In the past 24-48 hours, we've utilized Daisy's settlement money in a number of ways; she's paid off some large debts and at least one credit card. I'll be paying off large chunks of my own credit cards as well, within the coming days. I've also replenished our savings account and will be taking care of a few other needs of my own, and we'll still have quite a bit left over.

I've mentioned before that one of my primary sources of anxiety and stress is money issues -- not having enough, or not having what I need available when it is needed. That's something I can (mostly) safely relax about now; we're okay. I'm not saying "let's get into a nasty car accident again so we can do this all over again" or anything, but at least for everything Daisy struggled through and the pain she experienced due to the accident, she and I can be a little more comfortable financially a few years after the fact. Was it worth the pain and the like? No, of course not, I wouldn't wish that on anyone (okay, maybe a few people, but certainly not my wife), but she is happy as well to get a bit of vindication and the ability to pay down debts just as much as I am. It's sort of one of those "I'm so happy to see you, but I wish it were under different circumstances" sort of scenarios.

It is good that I don't have the stress and anxiety about money at the moment because work the past few nights has been soul-crushing and deeply frustrating. Hurricane Ida has made our work lives difficult, as have the multiple thunderstorms we've been getting in Omaha every single night for the past several days. Thunderstorms are triggering to me now because of all the tree damage we had earlier in the summer and the need to remove the split tree. I used to love storms -- I'd open the windows and doors and sit there watching/listening to them. Even the worst storms I experienced as a kid weren't usually horrific and damaging.

Now, though -- because of climate change -- there's no such thing as a non-damaging thunderstorm anymore, at least not in the midwest. There's no such thing as "light storms," or "a few rumbles of thunder with some rain" anymore. Every storm this summer has had damaging winds, hail in some places, close lightning strikes and flooding rains. We're extremely lucky that Omaha hasn't had multiple tornado scares this year -- we almost never get tornadoes up here anymore, so when we do, it is an event -- but fuck am I sick of being triggered by every storm we have. I legitimately have a physical reaction where I wince and twitch now with every big thunderclap. I never thought I'd be this type of person, but here I am.

I took this coming Thursday night off to stretch out my holiday weekend -- I'll be off Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I needed this. It'll give me some breathing space and a true relaxation day on Friday, where I will likely order pizza -- as a rare treat -- and watch a movie, do some cleaning, and decompress. I've been so stressed and anxious recently that the money resolving that and the holiday weekend coming up is going to be a huge blessing to me. I have high hopes that it will sort of center me, and reset my spirit a bit. I thought about taking tomorrow off too, but that's likely overkill. Anytime a holiday comes up I want padding on both ends of it if possible, but I'm so sick of the routine that I want to run screaming in the other direction as soon as I can -- however, I'll stay the course for these last two nights...I just have to keep my head down and get through them.

Of course, I also plan to work on the novel more in my downtime too; I'd like to get through the first five or six chapters by the end of the weekend, and if I can do that I can feel like I'm getting it to a much better place and flesh out the primary plotline more as we dive into the characters' lives. Again, it's more difficult than I thought it would be, but it's exhilarating to finish a chapter and move on to the next. I started chapter two last night and I find it fascinating to see this world being created. I'm excited for the process as much as I am the product.

So anyway, that's August for you. Let's move on now, into September....