Brandon and Daisy Venture to North Carolina, Episode II: "Dogged"

 The trip from Omaha to Charlotte was mostly uneventful. I dozed off a few times on the plane. While I do love the adventure aspect of air travel I am not really a fan of the actual process, and I'm sure few are. This is primarily because I am not a small person, and neither is Daisy, and cramming ourselves into these airplane seats is not comfortable for flights longer than an hour or two at most. We make do with what we can, but none of it is particularly comfortable or fun.

Omaha to Charlotte is a somewhat long flight -- I believe it was like two and a half hours. We were, of course, flying halfway across the country. And, as mentioned before, we were flying American Airlines.

Hoo boy.

I learned during this trip that there are two classes of people -- there are people who can afford to fly Delta, which has upped its game tremendously over the course of the past decade or so, and then there are the people who aren't willing to pay double the ticket prices and who have to fly the low-cost airlines with multiple stops and/or multiple layovers. American is fine for what it is; it's likely near the top tier of the lower-cost airlines -- but the people who fly American are definitely a completely different class of people than the ones who fly airlines like Delta. American Airlines customers are definitively more white trash and generally just trashy people as a whole, and this was exhibited on these flights to and from North Carolina. People were rude, they were drunk, they were disgruntled -- it was very noticeable. 

It didn't help that American has zero screens in the back of their plane seats, they offer zero reading materials (not even a SkyMall magazine -- does that even still exist?), and their flight attendants were not only rude for the most part but were not even really attractive people. Does that make sense? I don't know if I've ever been on a set of flights were the flight attendants weren't gorgeous young women or very good looking flamboyant gay men -- at least not until these flights. I'm not trying to be elitist when I say that, but just factual. Is the job of flight attendant not traditionally, stereotypically, performed by some of the most attractive people possible? I'm not judging but rather making a wow observation that apparently this is no longer the case, at least not for American Airlines.

But the plus side is, American Airlines will give you the entire can of soda or juice when the in-flight snack service comes by. Delta and most other airlines will adamantly refuse to do that. I appreciate this, of course. I'm a guy who drinks like 100oz of liquid or more per day, and a little 4oz cup of soda watered down with ice isn't going to cut it if I'm thirsty. 

So, there we were, on long flights with zero screens to occupy us. Like I said, I dozed off for a bit a few times. Daisy read one of Nora McInerny's books that she hadn't yet read before. 

When we got to our gate in Charlotte, we found that our flight into Wilmington had been delayed. By the time we got on it, it had been delayed twice. I believe that they mentioned some sort of nebulous "mechanical issue" and that the planes would need to be swapped out, but honestly I was tired and didn't really pay that close attention. We finally got on it, later than expected, and lifted off towards Wilmington.

I had never flown into Wilmington airport. I expected it to be the equivalent of Morgantown's airport back home -- a small municipal airport with a couple of gates and one little terminal. I mean, Halifax's airport is pretty small and so is Bangor's -- and both of them I'm sure could be far larger than they actually are based on the population in their areas.

Well, Wilmington is apparently a big jumping off point for numerous touristy areas around coastal North Carolina -- it is on the coast itself, of course -- including Oak Island and other tourist towns and beaches, given its proximity. So it was a bit of a larger airport than I was expecting. And we were flying in riiiiiiight before Labor Day weekend, the last big tourism holiday of the summer.

It is not a bad airport. It is indeed somewhat small, but not as small as I expected. It's designed really well, really intuitively, and has some very pretty southern architecture. As we were arriving something like two hours later than expected, we still had to wait in line for the rental car.

We got to the rental car line and there were two people in front of us who were very chatty with the attendants. There was a long line that was forming behind us. I was very tired and irritable, we had already missed our opportunity to go get food somewhere or do any actual grocery shopping before we would get to my parents' house because it was late, and I had not had any nicotine other than the Nicorette mints in about nine hours at this point -- and the mints really don't work that well if you're going to use them for hours upon hours on end. Their effectiveness really begins to wane around hour six or so. I was getting very frustrated and irritated, to the point where I wanted to scream shut up, make with the keys, people have places to be to the customers in line in front of us who were so incessantly chatty. 

This is a failing of mine and I'm working on it, though I do not think I'll ever be able to rid myself of it entirely.

We were given the choice of a Camry or a Malibu for our rental car. I chose the Malibu, as we have had multiple Malibus in the past for rentals and knew how everything worked in them. I wasn't about to choose a Camry that we had no clue how to operate or where the controls were, etc -- new cars are confusing and mostly uncomfortable, as evidenced by the new Hyundai Elantra we rented last summer on our trip to Canada -- a car I never want to sit in again or ever drive.

I don't even remember what color Malibu we got now. That's how inconsequential it was to me for the trip. I believe it was black or a very dark gray. It was a fleet vehicle with Massachusetts plates I believe. Or Connecticut. Or Wisconsin. One of those states. Is it important now? Not at all.

It was already dark by the time we got it out of the rental lot and was only getting darker as we made our way to my parents' house, which was about a...eh, 40, 45-minute drive. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but we were again reminded that North Carolina drivers are fucking crazy, and that North Carolina highways -- even the interstates -- do not have lights on them. So we were driving through the dark, passing by swamps, over bridges and through forests almost completely in pitch-black conditions -- which I hate. 

"How many gators do you think we've unknowingly driven by, just off the side of the road in the swamp?" I asked Daisy.

By the time we arrived, my mother had already gone to bed for the night -- my dad made sure she got up and saw us for a bit before she returned to bed. We were exhausted, and we were immediately accosted by the dogs. 

My parents have three dogs -- two golden retrievers and one shih-tzu. Sofie (yes, spelled with an F) is the oldest and largest golden retriever I've ever seen. She's now 11 or 12, which is ancient for a dog of her size and weight, and when we visited WV in 2017 she had to be close to 200 pounds -- this dog was larger than either of my parents and heavier at that. In her old age since, she has now dropped a lot of weight (she's like 115, 120 now) but is still quite large and is absolutely nuts. She's a dog the size of a small bear -- she will step on you, she will knock you down, she will bark and howl in your face, and if she doesn't get the attention she wants, she will bitch-slap you across the face with her paw, sending your glasses flying across the room. 

Don't ask me how I know about that last one. 

The second golden retriever is a new addition to the household since we were in town last year -- her name is Annie and my mother insisted she be adopted from someplace in WV once her breeding years were over, so they did -- last fall, after we left. Annie is six or seven, and is very nearly the perfect dog. She is very sweet, very intelligent, makes a great guard dog, and is active and playful without being an asshole about it. She is what I would describe as the ideal golden retriever, the dog I wanted when I was growing up. 

Hachi is the shih-tzu, and he is eight or nine at this point -- I can't remember how old. I know that when we were in WV in 2017 he wasn't a puppy, but he also wasn't fully grown either. He is a very sweet, hyper little yappy dog who actually closely resembles the (now long-deceased) shih-tzu we had when I was growing up, Moot. But, unlike Moot, Hachi isn't an asshole. Moot was the biggest asshole dog I've ever known. Hachi is like Moot without the asshole tendencies like growling and biting at you or trying to hump you to dominate you. He's a sweet boy, a lapdog, and he really loves people. He especially seems to love me when I visit. Per my dad, Hachi has girlfriends all up and down the street and all over the island, and is universally loved by everyone.

So, as we arrived, we were basically bowled over by the dogs. And of course, they're loud and unruly, which woke up the parrot, who also became loud and unruly and began screaming, all at like 10pm. Daisy and I were tired, unshowered, had eaten very little (we'd had some food in the airport but that's about it) and just wanted to relax, decompress, and go to bed. 

I don't remember much of the rest of the night; I don't even remember if I showered or not. My mother went back to bed, and dad and I sat on the back porch for a bit so I could vape, then we watched a bit of Picard as the parents had recently acquired Paramount+ and he was just beginning the third (and best) season of the show. I don't remember if I ate anything else. I don't remember if Daisy ate anything else. I was burnt out from traveling the entire way and eventually, I went to sleep with her.

When I woke up the next morning, Friday morning, it was early. My mother is usually up by 7 or so, so she tells me now -- which is a somewhat new thing. The dogs usually get my dad up around the same time, maybe slightly thereafter. But I was up around 5 and could sleep no longer -- the bed in that guest room, which we slept on last year too, is so very hard to sleep on for me, especially as I get older. It really messes with my hips, knees, and shoulders, and the parents keep the house a lot warmer than we keep ours at home, even with the AC. Even though it's my parents' house and therefore my home by extension, I was not about to turn their thermostat down to 67 or 66 -- the temperature we like it at home when it's hot in the summer.

And it is hot in North Carolina. It can be cooling down everywhere else, but in late August/early September, it is very much still summer in North Carolina, and with that comes humidity (I mean, we're on an island there, so there's ocean) and oppressive coastal heat. It was usually already into the low 80s by the time the sun came up in the morning -- I am only guessing there -- and got into the mid 90s by the time the sun was well into the sky. It can be very uncomfortable.

Because it was so early, I got up and made a cup of coffee and tried to get a small sandwich or something to eat without being too loud for the family. The dogs at this point are used to me, and used to us moving around when it's still dark -- Sofie will watch me, acknowledge me and wag her tail a little. Hachi usually sleeps with dad, and Annie usually sleeps on a dog bed next to the bed in the master bedroom.

Oh, there's something else I should mention, lest this story become more confusing without it -- my dad has been sick. He went to the hospital the week before we arrived because he's had pain in his abdominal region stretching down into his groin area. He thought it was a possible kidney stone, a hernia, or a flare up of diverticulitis -- which he has had for some time, but hasn't had any real incidents of note of for many years. When he went to the doctor, he was told it wasn't a hernia and was indeed a diverticulitis flare up, and got some antibiotics for it. He still felt like shit, but the antibiotics helped. Still, he was moving a lot more slowly and in pain, and because of Annie being a nut and running circles around the bedroom when both of them were in bed -- and I am sure because of the pain too -- he had been sleeping on the couch in the living room almost exclusively, for what I assumed to be some length of time. While we were there, he got further results back from his doctor that confirmed that yes, he had multiple kidney stones too -- something that would have been nice to know about previously, of course. 

So, he slept on the couch, which made it a bit difficult for us to move about the house in the night or early morning hours for, well...pretty much any reason. I am not a quiet person, though I try to be as much as possible. Daisy has told me before how loud of a person I really am even when I'm trying to be quiet. And I also cannot see in the dark. The Keurig makes noise when you make coffee. Doors opening and closing make noise. Lights shower light all over the main floor of the house. The refrigerator and microwave make noise. The back porch lights turn on and off with a voice command to the Alexa. I can't stop those things from happening, I can only try to lessen their impact as much as possible. So it was a...very interesting routine I had every morning in trying to not disturb the parents before they naturally got up. I honestly don't know how I didn't wake them. Maybe I did and they didn't say anything.

Anyway.

That day, Daisy wanted to go get some vegan food, and we needed to go to the grocery store to get us some food and other incidentals for a few days. The place Daisy wanted to go was back in Wilmington, a place called the Sealevel Vegan Cafe. I actually think I'd found it some time ago in doing some research of the area -- it had what was apparently voted PETA's best vegan hot dog of 2021, a cornflake-batter coated dog with buffalo sauce and slaw on it. I honestly cannot remember what it was called now, but it was something I'd noted that I wanted to go try while we were down there, so Daisy made it one of the stops we'd make. 

We went there that morning through a classic Carolina torrential rainstorm, a storm that was not really predicted and raged while we were inside. The food was fine. The dog was disappointing, and easily the least favorite thing I ordered (though still good). What was fire was their chickenless chicken sandwich and the made in-house kettle cooked potato chips.

Afterwards, we went to get vegan donuts and beignets at some little mostly-abandoned place downtown, picked up some groceries to last us a few days, and returned home.

There are a lot of things we did on the trip that I have a hazy memory of now, honestly. I was drained the entire time we were there. The bed in our guest room was less than comfortable, as I mentioned, and it felt like I was constantly inflamed while I was there -- allergies were terrible (they were last year too) and all of my joints constantly hurt when there. Ibuprofen and glucosamine were my best friends. I was in a lot of body pain. Daisy seemed to fare mostly okay for the most part, which surprised me. The most enjoyable parts of the trip for me were the times when I was just able to be myself -- the hour or two in the mornings where I could get a quiet cup of coffee on the porch with my vape and a book, and just sink into the chair. Some mornings I got bored and restless doing this and hoped everyone would just wake up and move about the house so I could have some company, and others I was so relaxed I could've fallen asleep on the porch chair -- and may have for a few minutes, briefly, from time to time. 

The next day, Saturday, was the home opener for West Virginia University's football season, versus Penn State. I had been looking forward to watching the game with my parents for weeks, as it would be the first game we'd been able to watch together for many years. Daisy was on board for this and was excited in her own way as well -- she is not a fan of football at all (despite my many years of trying to indoctrinate her into its cult), but as she's told me many times about a great many times, she just loves to see me excited and happy, as that makes her happy too. My parents, of course, are football fans and can, at times, be very passionate about it -- indeed, the first thing I saw when we pulled up to the house a few nights prior was the giant WVU flag I'd sent them for Christmas last year proudly flying off the flagpole on the front porch.

However, that morning was the local craft fair -- which we were interested in going to. The farmer's market we'd been so excited to go to when we were down there had ended for the season a week or two prior, but the craft fair (which was half of the farmer's market anyway, and in the same spot) was going strong and was done on Saturday mornings, apparently. So we'd planned to go to that. We asked my mother if she wanted to join us and she said she would. Dad would not, he was not feeling great and did not want to have to walk around for an hour or two -- which I understood, of course. Craft fairs aren't really his thing anyway. They're not really my thing either, but I know Daisy found several really neat things when we were down there last year, and I know my mother likes them and usually sees people she knows. So, we all piled into our rental car and the three of us went -- marking the first and only time that we've ever driven my mother anywhere for any reason. 

There wasn't really anything there that any of us wanted or were willing to spend the money on, but Daisy did get this really cute picture of us:

Multicolored hair and all. 

Also shows the size difference between me and my (very small) mother -- I am very surprised that I came out of a woman that small:

Like, I'm a big guy, but I'm not like 600 pounds or anything. It seems like my mother gets smaller every year. Her own mother did that too as she got older, and I am slowly shrinking in height as I get older as well. I guess it's a familial trait?

Anyway.

After the craft fair, as we were not there that long, we stopped at one of the "Beach Life" (or whatever it's called) souvenir shops -- which I figured would be a fun excursion to take with my mother in tow. I have not gone shopping with my mother for anything in well over fifteen years at this point, so having her come with us while I got some salt-water taffy and a hoodie, I thought, would be a fun excursion. And it was. She found a dolphin necklace she wanted, and we got it for her (Daisy later told me how she would likely wear it proudly all around everywhere and tell people her son bought it for her while he was in visiting, which warmed my heart). I got a long-sleeved sky-blue shirt and a black hoodie with "save the turtles" on it or something; I thought it was nice and the generic Oak Island hoodie I bought down there last year, from the same shop, was great -- it is warm and comfortable as hell, and it got heavy use last fall and winter -- so this one I expect to get the same amount of wear and use. 

We returned to the house and watched the game -- it did not go well for WVU and I dozed off on the couch for a decent chunk of it. By the time the second half rolled around I had mostly lost interest; I spoke to my oldest aunt on the phone for a decent amount of time when she called, and my mother went to bed early. I don't remember what Daisy and I did; I know we sort of just eventually retired to our room and fell asleep at some point. 

This was how most of the trip went -- get up for the day, have something planned that we do that takes some of the day, return to the house, and then spend the rest of the day at home while everyone winds down. Interspersed with a trip to the beach here and there. 

Brandon and Daisy Venture to North Carolina, Episode II: "The Sequel"

(mostly written the morning we left, with some edits made after our return)

 Hi all.

Well, there is a lot to talk about going on in the background, and I alluded to that in my last entry here, but for now, it's time to talk about the trip to visit my parents in NC. I will go back and cover the other stuff when I can, of course.

So as you may or may not know, soon after our return from Canada (during which I zeroed out any and all PTO I had stored), I began making calculations and running some numbers to see whether we could feasibly, somewhat inexpensively, visit my parents in North Carolina this fall. Flights were looked at with varying departure dates, varying departure times, and of course variable prices. I knew and only knew the following:

1. I did not want to leave on a first-AM flight that would require us to be at the airport at like 4am

2. I did want to fly directly into Wilmington instead of Raleigh this time around, to eliminate the 3-4 hours of driving time in the rental car before we were even to the island upon which my parents live; Wilmington is 30ish miles from my parents' house versus 170-180 from Raleigh

3. I did not want to get a departure flight home that wouldn't get us back in Omaha until well after nightfall

4. I did not want non-refundable tickets 

5. I did want trip protection insurance, seat selection pick guarantees, and priority boarding (I paid extra for all of these things -- the priority boarding I added when we checked in for the flight online about 12 hours before leaving)

6. I did not want to check baggage for a five-day trip.

I had some, ahem, points of contention with the wife for that last one.

"[Daisy], all you really need is like three outfits and your swimsuit. And some sandals. My parents have a washer and dryer -- we can wear the same shit more than once, after it's washed of course," I said.

You know that old adage that some people plan and pack for a trip months in advance, and some throw a random smattering of shit into a suitcase the day of, and they marry each other? That's us. Want to guess which one of those two I am?

Okay, just to eliminate the guessing game, I'm the one who had his bag for this trip -- and it was indeed a bag, a sturdy canvas backpack -- packed fully by sometime around the second week of July. In fact, when the power went out and we were in the dark ages again, I had to go to that bag to pull out my iPhone charger to take to the parents' to re-fill my phone's battery.

Daisy is very much of the mindset that she may need to wear multiple outfits every day, because she wants something for all occasions -- in addition to needing every book, vitamin, gummy vitamin, granola bar, cosmetic, her hair dryer, etc. known to man. For a five-day trip.

My bag? Aside from the small essentials like my pills and a few vapes and my phone charger? Three pairs of shorts, four shirts, four pairs of underwear, a spare pair of glasses, and a spare pair of flip-flops. In a small Ziploc I also have Q-tips, my toothbrush/toothpaste, and some sinus/allergy pills. In the front compartment of my bag I have a single stick of deodorant, a single shampoo bar, and a single bar of soap. I also have a small Ziploc filled with our laundry detergent sheets and dryer sheets, so we don't have to worry about Daisy having any sort of allergic reaction to the stuff my parents use. I also included four tie-dyed shirts I made for my parents for their birthday, which was the week prior to our arrival. The real present is us, of course, but the last time I made them tie-dyes they loved them, so I figured that was a fun idea.

Part of packing light for me is because, yes, I will be perfectly fine wearing the same outfits a couple of times -- I'm at home with my parents; I have nobody to impress. Part of it is that I long to travel light, to not have to take a suitcase on a cross-country trip. And, finally, part of it is that there is a 30-pound box of comic books for my Dad, in my backpack, that is taking up a lot of space and weight. Once it is out of there, and once the parents' shirts are out of there...I will have a much lighter bag and much more space for anything I bring back. 

Anyway.

For all of those things in the above requirement list to be fulfilled -- regardless of the stuff about packing -- the round trip tickets for both of us, everything included, was close to $1200. 

It is what it is. Air travel is expensive.

Daisy was not happy with me about this, but I reminded her that there are precious few times left that we'll get to visit my parents when they're both alive, and they are genuinely grateful and excited when we go to see them. Plus, I was booking this trip, and was handling everything for it to my own, very admittedly neurotic, specifications. All Daisy had to do was book the rental car, which she did -- and very inexpensively at that.

Daisy's parents -- more Dad than Mama -- agreed to watch over the children [read: our cats] while we were gone, and I made sure to order them some extra treats and an extra case of food just in the event that we could be better prepared for any unforeseen circumstances. Daisy set up all of the security cameras around the house -- basically, nanny cams for the cats -- so that we could view them while we're gone. I put a hold on the mail, went down my to-do list checklist to make sure I took care of all I could, removed my debit card from my wallet and left my keys here (in the event Dad needed to take the car out of the garage for any reason) and grabbed all of my extra cash so I didn't have to use my travel-approved credit cards for absolutely everything while we were there. We told the parents we would Uber to the airport for the flight, but Dad insisted on driving us over there himself. 

My overall goal for the trip was not to be there for amusements or for destination events -- it is to finally be able to decompress and fucking relax for a few days. I have been wound so tightly and for so long that it's seriously starting to affect my mental health, my stress reactions, and my responses to people and things in my circle around me. On top of it all I have just been so very tired, so exhausted by life and everything bad that's happened this year that I just needed a genuine break; I needed it all to stop. While Canada was very fun and we did a lot of fun things while up there, I did not really see it as a vacation but more of a "family visit obligation." I was so burnt out by the end of it that I wasn't myself, I was but a withered husk of myself in clothes and flip-flops. 

The good thing about visiting my parents is that it can all just stop if we want it to -- we have no social obligations in North Carolina. We have no friends there. We went all the places we were interested in when we were there last year. We have no places we had to go to this year, aside from the grocery store and Walmart to get some essentials. Daisy wanted to go to the beach every day, which was not a hard concept because we're on an island. We also wanted to visit a few vegan restaurants to try what they have, but even that wasn't super-imperative to either of us, really. 

So, the parents picked us up from the house and got us to the airport on the morning of the trip, we got through security quickly and efficiently, and we finally lifted off the ground -- wheels up, jets blasting, toward North Carolina...

Back to the Dark Ages, Part II

I fully admit that as my memory of what happened during this time is really fuzzy, I may be missing some details or getting part of the timeline wrong. What I can tell you is that this is the series of events as I remember them, and I apologize for any inaccuracies.

 My power banks were not completely dead, but I knew I'd need more power for them. Daisy had made a deal with me before she'd gone over to the parents' that if it wasn't back, they could come get me on Friday -- as I no longer would have to work, Friday/Saturday are my normal days off -- and I could eat, recharge everything, enjoy some air conditioning and some company for several hours.

I had also had some foresight -- on Thursday night, when a lot of cell signal had finally returned (signifying that repairs to the power grid were, finally, really progressing) I had gone on Amazon from my phone and had ordered a massive power bank for next-day delivery. Knowing that such items generally come pre-charged at least halfway, if not more (some come fully charged right out of the box), I figured that it would be enough to get me through however long this bullshit was going to last once it arrived, in the event that I couldn't get over to the parents' that early on Friday. 

Charging my phone with my oldest power bank while I was dozed off that morning in the early morning hours in my chair killed that power bank down to 0% and only brought my phone up to around 70%. Charging my vapes and my mp3 player's speaker dropped the other one down to 30%, and then to 0% by around 9:30 that morning, after I'd showered in the dark by the light of the radio lantern to get all of the sweat off me.

I was able to reach Daisy and told her that whenever they wanted to come rescue me for the day, I'd be very grateful. The house was so very stuffy and humid and it was getting to the point where I could no longer really function without some actual food in my stomach or air conditioning. I was also going completely, totally stir crazy -- I had listened to the radio until it died, wound it back up and listened to it more until it died again, had read through every single comic I had in my reading stack to the point where I was so very sick of reading anything, and (because it didn't require electricity) pulled two fresh white shirts out of the closet to tie-dye them because I needed something to fucking do. 

Daisy and her parents did come to get me and I went over to their house for several hours -- I took a bag of everything I could think of that I would need to charge, and plugged all of it in once I got there. I got some food, some air conditioning, and some desperately-needed internet time on my phone, during which I reached out to my coworkers to let them know that no, I still did not have power and had no real ETA for when it would be back. I was also able to follow a lot of OPPD's repairs in real-time -- they were restoring about 10,000 customers every hour or two for a long time, and had already cut the outages in half -- but were already saying that some customers may not be restored for a week or more for the heavily-damaged areas.

And, let me tell you, there was heavy damage. Having been stuck at home, I hadn't been able to see the actual real-life devastation that 90-100mph winds could do, and had done, to most of the city. I'm not sure I've ever seen so many downed trees -- trees that had to 80-100 years old split right down their centers or completely uprooted. Garage doors and windows blown in. Entire trees resting on roofs that were very clearly caved in by the impact. So many, so many fences blown down in large chunks, or completely destroyed. Cars smashed by trees laying on their roofs. I've seen some pretty extensive storm damage before -- after all, I have lived in tornado alley for almost eighteen years now -- but never so much seemingly random and very widespread. Some large trees were completely destroyed and on top of people's homes, while other trees and homes twenty yards away looked pristine and untouched.

Our street, and many others, had the neighborhood denizens clean up what they could and place the debris on the curbs, which (we were told) would be picked up by city clean-up crews and hauled away. 

As I am writing this, it is August 23 and they haven't touched our street yet when it comes to storm cleanup. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

That Friday afternoon, once everything was charged, I came back to the house to take care of the cats and watch over it in the event power came back on. Daisy and I had an agreement that as soon as the power came back, I was to let her know and she'd come home. We also had an agreement that once it did come back, we weren't turning everything on immediately (like the air conditioner) so that if it died again in twenty minutes, it wouldn't blow stuff up.

The new power bank had arrived, delivered by Amazon, in the time I was over at the parents'. While Daisy gathered some stuff from the house to take back over to the parents' -- because as long as the power was out and we had no AC, she wasn't sleeping at home -- and cleaned the litter pans, I unboxed it to find that it had come with a 77% charge out of the box already. I immediately put it to use. 

Let me tell you, folks, invest in a good, high-capacity power bank if you have not already done so. This is the one I got, and holy shit:

 With 77% power out of the box, this little power bank charged my phone from almost dead to completely full no less than five times, charged all of my vapes countless times, and charged my mp3 player, and its speaker at least twice. At full power I may have been able to run my computer off it for a while. 

Shortly after 6pm on Friday night, we hit 48 hours without power.

At this point I was very hot and very frustrated; everything in the fridge and freezer was now certainly ruined and would need to be disposed of, and we'd just gotten a lot of groceries the week prior. Cold things, frozen things, and a lot of vegan things that were expensive. Adding insult to injury was that I'd just gotten two brand new bottles of pumpkin spice coffee creamer that I'd been waiting to come back into stock, finally, for the fall season -- and as soon as they had, I immediately snapped up two of the last ones the store had left. All ruined. Everything ruined.

Also, at this point we didn't even know if the fridge would turn back on when the power did, as we know our luck and the fridge was one of the big appliances in the house we had yet to replace -- and it's easily 20, 25 years old. 

I listened to podcasts and drifted in and out of sleep on the couch for most of the overnight hours; it was about all I could do. When my phone was charged I would obsessively check the OPPD restoral map and website for updates to see if there was anything new on restoral efforts. What had been over 200,000 on Wednesday night had dropped to about 60,000, then 40,000, and then as they worked they apparently must've hit/taken out another grid, because it jumped back up into the fifties again.

By the early morning hours of Saturday, before it was light outside, I made sure the cats were fine and I went upstairs to my office, where I opened up the window and put one of the battery-powered fans on my desk chair to blow cool air from outside directly on me. I then dozed off and on some more. 

It was far too hot to sleep upstairs -- heat rises, and it was already in the mid-80s in the master bedroom. The window and the little fan wouldn't help that much. The living room downstairs was by default the naturally coolest room in the house, and when it was cool I could open the window at one end and the French doors at the other end and establish a little airflow and circulation throughout the house. However, I didn't want to do that at night -- for one, raccoons, opossums, stray cats, rabbits, and all sorts of other creatures (including at least one skunk I have seen) use our neighborhood's backyards like a transit superhighway, and all I needed was for a skunk to come up on the porch, have one of the cats see it and go running to the screen door...

For two, even though it was pitch black dark in our entire area with everyone's power out, an open window even with a screen in it on the lower floor of a house, facing the street, is like begging someone to break in and start robbing the place -- something else I didn't want, especially not when I would be sleeping on the couch six feet from said window. 

The house stank. With no airflow and without our air cleaners able to run without power, every time one of the cats went to the pan, you would smell every scent molecule...eventually, once the scent made its way over to you. The air was stale, breathed-in, humid, and oppressive. Saturday's temperatures were supposed to be in the 90s and Sunday's were predicted to hit 100. 

This is part of the reason I went upstairs early Saturday morning -- I needed to go sit in my room and acclimate myself to the heat as the day got hotter. I have a battery-operated atomic clock on my wall that also has a thermometer on it -- the thermometer said that it was 88.9 in my office. The longer I could deal with that as it got hotter, the better it would feel when I went back downstairs later in the day where the temperature was only about 83ish. 

For perspective, we keep our thermostat, year round, anywhere between 67 and 71 depending on the time of year. In the summer, on the brutal days, I will occasionally put it down to 66 or 65 to make the air conditioner run longer, and in the winter when I'm freezing I'll sometimes turn it up to 72 to keep the furnace running for a while longer as well. The normal, ambient temperature in my upstairs office, even when the AC is on in the summer, rarely goes below 75. Right now as I write this, it's 77.

But 88.9 was not the end of it.

As the day went on that Saturday and everything heated up, it reached 96.7 in my office -- and this is well after I closed the window and curtain to keep the sun/heat out. There was nothing that could really be done. I forced myself to deal with it as long as I could, and began having flashbacks to summers in Kansas in that rented house with a very old, almost non-functional AC unit. 

Still, I thought, the cats -- though they were far younger then -- lived in Kansas with me without any real air conditioning, with nowhere near the number of amenities and conveniences they have now, and they were all fine. You lived through it too, Brandon -- you'll be fine. People and cats live without air conditioning all over the world and they survive it every day.

By the afternoon and evening hours I had finished off all of the bottles of water, Powerade, and almost any other hydrating liquid in the house. I was starving, I was very sleep-deprived, I was overheated, and I was just done with this no power bullshit. I would stare at the clock, sometimes talking to it, asking time itself to turn the power back on, please, it had been long enough. I was correct in my assumption that it would feel far better going downstairs after forcing myself to bake all day in the sauna that is the upstairs of the house -- but before I did, I took another cool shower in a desperate attempt to feel better. 

I used a coupon code I had in my email as well as a special deal discount that Papa John's was running, and ordered a single large pizza with extra cheese, roma tomatoes, and onions -- I have ordered pizza from the Papa for so long that it is, to this day, the only password I have memorized over the years and know it by heart. 

I only ordered one because, despite my appetite for pizza, it's not like I could stick it in the fridge or freezer for later. It arrived within 25 minutes and I tipped the delivery driver very well and told him he was my savior because I still had no power and just needed to eat something. 

I ate 2/3 of the pizza very rapidly, and saw movement on the street out of the corner of my eye -- it was multiple OPPD bucket trucks driving down my little residential street, followed by a few guys in hard hats walking up and down the sidewalks. Almost as soon as I texted this information to Daisy, all of them disappeared.

Around 6pm Saturday night, we hit 72 hours without power. 

It was also around this time where the new, very high-capacity power bank finally died, which left me with only the two smaller ones. 

Pete was not a fan of being without Daisy, but he was even less of a fan of the heat. He was flopped out on the couch next to me, dozing off and on, looking at me like "it's hot, bruh."

Empress was still fairly active and somewhat playful -- she brought me her ball to play fetch with her a few times before finally just giving up and sprawling out on the hardwood floor like "it's too hot for this shit, dad."

The temperature in the downstairs of the house reached 86. When I went upstairs to make sure they had new, cool, clean water in their bowls, it was 88.9 in the master bedroom and 96.8 in my office. Hank and Mable had tried to sleep upstairs in the hallway on the carpet and I very gently made them go back downstairs where it was much cooler.

It slowly began to get dark, and I'd resigned myself to yet another sweltering night without power. Daisy texted me and asked if I'd clean the litter boxes before it got too dark to see (it was already, frankly, too dark for me to see) and I told her I would. I also agreed to go back over to the parents' on Sunday, despite me needing to work Sunday night if the power was on, to again recharge things and get something to eat, soak in some air conditioning, etc.

About five minutes after that, I heard a click, saw the electric clock on the TV stand light up, and saw the ceiling fan slowly begin spinning again. 

After 74 hours, the power was finally back on. 

I immediately plugged in the power banks, as well as my phone, to get them to start recharging in the event that the power would go back out after a few minutes. It likely would've been a fruitless endeavor, but some juice is better than no juice. I also immediately texted Daisy to let her know the power was back on, and texted our neighbor (who was not at home) to let her know too. I turned on all of the ceiling fans and suddenly, there was air movement again throughout the house. The cats, who were all in deep heat-slumber scattered around the house, noticed the air movement and started to get peppy and awake again.

As excruciating as it was to wait, I waited about half an hour before (with a silent prayer to whatever higher power I do not believe in anyway) I turned on the air conditioner. It fired right up and began the long process of trying to cool down the house.

Daisy was dropped off by her parents a short time later, and we began putting our now-working appliances to use -- I could finally do some laundry, I could finally run the dishwasher to clean the multiple days' worth of dishes that had piled up. 

And then, we attacked the (now working) fridge and freezer.

Everything in it was, as we expected, a total loss. Everything in the freezer was cool to the touch, but it was certainly not frozen. Some stuff had liquified. A lot of stuff in the fridge had liquified. We didn't even bother trying to save the condiments or salad dressings or hot sauces -- it all went directly into the trash. The only thing save-able from the fridge was a ziploc bag full of candy bars I'd brought back from Canada -- candy bars that did not need to be refrigerated in the first place and were still somewhat cold. Everything else had to go -- hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of stockpiled frozen and refrigerated food, stuff that I didn't even know we had buried in the back of the fridge or freezer, all of it completely ruined and spoiled. To say we were devastated is an understatement. 

Aside from a brief fleeting power blip here and there over the course of the following few days, our power remained on and restored after it came back up. We had also found, upon closer examination of the storm damage over the time we were waiting for power restoral, that the one sole tree we have remaining on our property had a large, calf-sized branch that had cracked in half and was ready to come down in our backyard. Daisy ordered a pole saw and a handheld electric chainsaw and the next morning, Sunday, we used those tools to hack it off the tree, chop it up, and then we dragged it to the curb to match all of the damaged limbs and branches everyone else on the street had piled at the ends of their yards. That is where it remains even now, as mentioned above.

It took almost 24 hours before the AC returned the house to normal temperatures.

I put what remained of the pizza in the fridge once it was emptied and once Daisy gave it a good scrubdown cleaning (something she'd wanted to do for a while anyway). 

I did return to work that night (Sunday) and have been working since (well, more or less -- I'll get to this at another time). We did replace a lot of the food in the refrigerator/freezer -- slowly, cautiously, being mindful of what we really needed to have on hand versus what we just wanted. We even got a roofing crew to come out to the house and give us an estimate on the damage we sustained -- the piece of the siding that was ripped off was but a decorative cowling, not a true piece of siding; the roofing crew cut off the ripped part and nailed the rest of it back down in about thirty seconds. They also confirmed that we were missing zero shingles and the roof looked to be in relatively great shape -- so the shingles we found in our yard after the storm were not ours, apparently. Whose were they? Who knows -- 100mph winds could've blown them in from multiple blocks away. We tossed them in the trash. 

In the time since, life has returned to mostly normal. OPPD was indeed correct -- it did take some people in the area a week or more to have their power restored. Some people around the area (including some folks I work with) had a lot more damage, or they had power but their Cox internet was out for two more weeks before it was restored. As far as I am aware, no lives were lost in the storm.

So, that's the story. I am really, really hoping we don't have to live through such a nightmare again -- or any other nightmares, honestly, as we've had enough in 2024 as it is -- anytime soon.

More updates to come soon, as I have a lot to talk about that I have not even touched on here yet. 

Back to the Dark Ages, Part I

 I am...getting very, very tired of 2024.

I am about to tell you a story of events that happened a few weeks ago, and involved some particularly trying times. I'm not looking for sympathy or help (believe me, we're fine) but I am going to lay it out here for everyone because it was not pleasant.

As a lot of you know, this year has been, frankly, terrible for severe weather in the midwest. We have had numerous tornado close calls in and around Omaha, and some in April and May that actually hit parts of the city (notably the west side of Omaha, as well as the airport to the east of us). These storms, up until recently, thankfully missed our section of town -- or if we did get them, the effects were far milder than expected. There were several nights, though, where the tornado sirens went off at like 3, 4-something in the morning, and Daisy had to get up, come downstairs and help me wrangle the cats to get them into their carriers in the event that the tornadoes came close enough to where we'd have to either leave and take them with us or cram ourselves into the sturdiest, most closed-off room in the house -- our downstairs bathroom -- and hope for the best. 

As an aside, if you've never had to chase down, catch, and cram five cats -- two of them geriatric, and three of them who absolutely hate carriers -- into carriers in an emergency, all while tornado sirens are going off and you're trying to pay attention to the television to see if tornadoes are headed for your neighborhood and because it's still the overnight during the week, still being logged in and trying to work...I do not recommend this horseshit. It is not fun and one of the many reasons I absolutely must get out of the midwest as soon as humanly possible.

Anyway.

Our luck had been pretty good. The storms this season mostly blew over us or by us, and we could let the cats out of their carriers once the threat had passed, Daisy could go back to bed, I could resume my night of work and devote my full attention to it, etc. But this happened multiple times, and my nerves and patience for this spring/summer's storm season was at an end. By the time we returned from Canada in late June, I figured we were pretty much done with it.

And then July 31st happened.

Understand that in most years, July 31st is way past the "peak season" for tornadoes and severe weather in the midwestern states, even in the places I've lived (Missouri, Kansas, and now Nebraska). May and June are generally the high-point months, though it's been particularly nasty a few years in March and April too as the temperatures and weather patterns shift in the spring. So, end of July and into August we're reaching our hottest weather of the year in Omaha, but the weather is generally fairly quiet as we round the bell curve and head into more seasonal fall-like weather of September and October. 

As you folks know, I tend to follow weather pretty closely -- partly because of anxiety and partly because, especially in the months when I have to do so, I need to know when and how I will be able to mow the grass and do the string trimming, and Daisy needs to know when she has to water the garden and when she won't. My weather obsession also allows me to warn people at work, most of whom don't care because they don't have property to protect/live in secure apartment complexes, etc and won't follow the weather, that there's some bad stuff coming and that they should save their work frequently, and text us in leadership if they lose power or internet and the like. In the days leading up to the end of July, the weather people in and around Omaha predicted some moderate severe weather over the course of a few days that either never developed, or developed somewhere else than where they predicted, or started to develop but fizzled out. So, I wasn't really that concerned -- after all, the two giant trees that were problematic on our property we'd had removed after the storms of 2021. They were the only two trees around us that could have done substantial damage to our home were they to come down (and believe me, had we left them up, they would have in storms we've gotten between 2021 and now). Tornadoes are one thing -- straight line winds and downbursts that can't really be predicted more than a few minutes to an hour in advance are quite another.

So, on July 31, I had just gotten up for a normal Wednesday night of work when the sirens began going off. While there were a few small tornadoes around the area (the siren will trigger when there's one anywhere in the county, and I don't know how many were actually confirmed) the sirens were because the storm front that had formed while I had been sleeping that day, and had begun moving through the area, was capable of 80-100mph winds -- with a lot of those winds already being clocked at weather stations around and outside the city in the 70-90mph range.

This is wildly unusual for Nebraska. Yeah, the midwest is windy -- it is almost never like that. 

We turned on the TV, of course, and got the cats into the carriers in the event that we'd need to evacuate. It was at least 85 degrees outside -- muggy and stuffy, and in the span of about ten minutes, it got dark. Dark as actual night, at 6pm in July. The streetlights kicked on. Our porch light kicked on. And for a while, all was calm -- it looked like the worst of the storms were going to blow over us or blow by our part of the city. 

And then it hit. 

It's been a long time since I've seen storm winds like that. The house shook, everything rattled. The winds ripped giant limbs off trees at houses down the street, and they crashed to the ground and rolled, or were blown into roofs. The power went off and on about five or six times in very rapid succession over the course of a minute or two, and Daisy basically dove to turn off the air conditioner so that the fluctuations did not blow it up after we'd just had it fixed, all the while telling me, begging and pleading with me to get away from the windows to avoid flying limbs and objects (of which there were many -- but the wind was blowing from the opposite direction). After a few minutes of clicking off and on, the power finally gave out and stayed out. The storm raged outside. With it being black as night, I couldn't see anything inside the house -- I have really bad night vision. I also had an amazing, overruling anxiety need to watch the storm from the front window and watch when it passed enough to where we could basically look at it and say that we were in the all clear, or clear enough to get the cats back out of their carriers.

This took about an hour. In the midst of this, around 6:30 or so, I called in the power outage to report it, because that's what you're supposed to do. The automated message told me it would be fixed around 8:30.

Uh huh. Sure.

When the storm passed, it became light again outside -- at least normal lightness for a normal July evening, where it doesn't get dark dark until after 9pm. When it was done, people in the neighborhood began exiting their homes to survey damage and remove tree limbs from blocking the street. A trim piece of siding on the top level of our house was ripped off and hanging above our garage. There were shingles in our yard -- we did not know if they were ours or someone else's, because 90-100mph winds. There was damage and debris from trees all around us, in our yard, the street, on people's homes, etc. 

We were very thankful that we'd removed the large trees from our yard when we did.

But the power was still out.

We used our phones to follow the weather and confirm that the worst of everything was done for our area. Our signals were weak and it would take several tries to load a webpage at times. I had texted my boss and our crew at work that night (who was just arriving) that we had some minor damage to the house and the entire neighborhood was without power. My boss responded that he'd taken the night off work because he'd been sick anyhow, but he also had some minor house damage. I let them know that as long as all my stuff worked, as soon as the power came back up, I'd login. 

While the storms passed us, they were still wreaking havoc on the rest of the surrounding area, and that included what appeared to be the power stations feeding the cell towers. We went from spotty signal to zero signal on our phones at the drop of a hat. And when I say zero I mean just that -- no calls, no texts, no 5G internet, nothing. The entire network was gone, as if it was just wiped off the map. 

So, let's recap -- it's the middle of the week, last day of the month, it's 85 degrees outside (it dropped to around 70 once the storm rolled through), and we have no power. We have no power, it's getting dark and we haven't eaten anything yet, and we have no phones, no internet. Without power, we have no air conditioning -- in fact, no air movement whatsoever. We can see that there's been some damage to the house, but we don't know the extent of it -- for all we knew, there could have been water pouring down through the roof through holes or damage we didn't know about. We have two black cats we can't see in the dark, and three others who like to get under your feet at every opportunity. Oh, and because the power's out, we can't even get out of the garage to leave the house because we can't re-engage the garage door opener ourselves if we disengage it, as the spring's tension is what actually holds the door closed, not gravity or the door itself -- not to mention we wouldn't be able to lock it. The last time we disengaged it we had to call professionals to actually hook it back up.

We were, essentially, in the dark ages. 

However, all was not lost. 

After the storms in April and May, however, I invested in a multipurpose lantern/flashlight, weather and normal radio, and power-bank combo device that charged and ran from wind-up (it could also be fully charged via USB when there was power, of course). It was $30 at the time, and I knew that I'd rather have it and not need it than not have it when I really did. Well, now seemed to be that time. The lantern provided us some light once it was fully dark, and we sat on the couch and played a card game while we essentially waited for the power to come back on or for our phones to work again. I also had two separate power banks I'd purchased in the past for occasions like this, so we were able to charge up our phones.

By the time it got around to 11pm we were occasionally getting spotty signal on our phones again -- the power company said they'd clocked something like 218,000 outages in their service area from the storm. This was the biggest outage in their recorded history, and they were working around the clock to get damage repaired and service restored to their customers. Resigning myself to knowing that the power would likely not be back that night (and even if it was, it was going to come back while I was sleeping), Daisy and I got some battery powered fans, opened the window upstairs, and went to bed.

When I awoke around 5am, the power was still off. There was still almost no signal on my phone. I could occasionally get the OPPD (the power company) webpage to load detailing the outage numbers, and it appeared they were making good progress -- fixing about 5-10k customers per hour. 

I want to stop here for a moment to elaborate on how miserable it is to live without power in the 21st century, especially in a house that really doesn't have great cooling/ventilation/natural light, because ours does not have any of those things. You can't really do anything to not just keep busy or pass time, but you can't cook, you can't see, you can't do any real amount of chores, you can't even really eat anything because if you open the fridge, it lets the cold out. You're bound by what you can do in natural light, and that's about it. However, if it's very hot outside, you won't even want to do that stuff.

Daisy and I sat around the house most of Thursday as the temperature got hotter -- there was little else to do. As Thursday evening rolled around and we entered 24 hours without power, Daisy couldn't really take it anymore and said she was going to go sleep at her parents' -- who had never lost power, who had food and air conditioning and internet, and invited me to come with her. They'd come pick us up, it would be fine.

I couldn't do that -- I wanted to be here in the event the power came back, as I would need to work (I work on Thursday nights). Also, with the power completely out for the neighborhood, that meant no security cameras, no Ring, no security system whatsoever but me and my weapons, and we're not in the best neighborhood, though far from the worst -- it would be, for the criminal mind, prime time for home break-ins when, without cameras on them at all times, thieves would be bolder and know they wouldn't be caught.

Plus, I mean, the cats are here. Mable overheats easily, which we saw when we got back from Canada and still had to wait several days for the air conditioner to be repaired. I wanted to make sure the cats had food, fresh and cold water, and treats to keep them at least somewhat comfortable -- as much as possible -- while we lived through this ordeal.

So Daisy went over to the parents' and I stayed here at the house with the animals. I made sure I had reading materials, and luckily my mp3 player and speaker downstairs were both fully charged. I crashed out on the couch as it was much cooler downstairs, eventually moved upstairs to my chair in my room, and slept some more. My memories during this time are hazy/fuzzy as I was just so overheated, could barely sleep, and was so incredibly bored more than anything else with nothing I could do to alleviate it. I had considered writing, but I would require light for that and, also, my brain was so fuzzy that I couldn't really focus long enough to do anything worthwhile. I'm sure I was in the first stages of heatstroke. 

On Friday morning, the power was still off -- 36 hours now without it. 

Into the Wild Blue Yonder, Part II

 I darkened up the hair over the weekend with the "Blue Panther" blue-black dye, and it is now much darker and looks far better than the original electric "Voodoo Blue" color. I've also noticed that while the Voodoo Blue had a very high level of rinse-out -- meaning every time I showered I would see a lot of it washing out -- the Blue Panther does not. It did the first shower/rinse, of course, but I've seen very little rinse-out or dye transfer ever since. That stuff seemed to lock in and bond with my hair way stronger than the Voodoo Blue did.

I don't really have any great pictures of it, honestly, but here's one I just snapped with my phone:

Again, it is darker than it looks. This is pretty close to the shade I actually wanted when I originally dyed it. Over the course of the next few months I'll probably re-up it a few times until I'm out of the Blue Panther dye, and then will just let it grow out until spring when I tell the local SuperCuts (or whoever it is that does my hair) just to cut off all the color -- and then re-do it anew with new bleach and a new shade. 

No, I haven't decided yet what the next shade will be. 

Daisy mentioned to me this afternoon that she plans to re-do her own coloring in a few weeks' time, shortly before we leave for NC. Actually, I asked her first if she planned to do so, because her hair has really faded out over the course of the past month and now looks mostly dirty blonde with some green and blue in it here and there. Her hair also tends to grow faster than mine, so she already has a quarter-inch of roots showing (part of why I wanted to make the blue darker was so that when my roots grew out, it would blend in better). 

In other news...

I have reached the middle of my work week and I am weary, my friends. It's not just that I'm tired, or that the temperature outside has been nearly 100 every day -- we are in the middle of a heat wave here in Omaha -- it's not even that my allergies are going bugshit as well. It's that after a decade of this, I've reached the point where I'm seriously beginning to have creeping thoughts like yes, I know I'm good at this, but I do not know how much longer I can do this same bullshit day in, day out. 

Of course, I am not in a financial spot where I can just up and quit -- take a self-imposed run of unemployment and get a break -- and I likely never will be. But as the days go on and the people I deal with get dumber and dumber almost by the week, I feel the box closing in just a little bit more every day and I feel more trapped than ever. I've applied for a few jobs over the course of the past few weeks and months, but nothing that I have high hopes of getting a callback on.

To be fair, this is mostly my own doing on several fronts -- for one, I am not a particularly high-demand person for prospective employers. I was a decade ago; I am not now. I am a poet, a creative writer, a guy who used to be a newspaper reporter for awhile and a college professor for a few years after that, and I've now worked in a very dead-end and mostly thankless office middle-management position for ten years and have had all the motivation to learn new processes and new skills beaten out of me by multiple corporate overlords for multiple companies. 

For two, I have stuck around doing that for ten years. That means I've become very specialized in my particular field but have little to offer of value in any other field. My brain doesn't work now like it used to ten years ago -- it is very difficult for me to learn and retain new procedures, new programs, new training and new things in general. I used to be able to pick up new things, learn them quickly, and master them before almost anyone else I knew. Now, I am reticent, easily confused, forgetful of some of the processes that have been thrust upon me even within the past year, and am just trying to skate by on what of my knowledge base I still have that's still applicable to the job at hand. I do very well at this most of the time, but because I can't pick up on all the new stuff, I have a hefty sense of imposter syndrome and mental fatigue.

I manage people very well; I am a very good leader of people and all of my underlings (a term I use lovingly) would very likely agree. But I don't want to do it forever. I don't want this to just be my life.

It is not lost on me, of course, that 2024 marks the 15-year anniversary of me leaving the grocery store job I was working when I started this website -- the stories I heard while working there are what led me to start this site in 2007 in the first place. Those of you who have stuck around with me for a very long time -- I'm talking about my lifelong friends, the ones from high school and college who do still read this -- know that everything prior to 2011 on this site was removed, edited, and turned into a 400+ page manuscript for a humorous book that I sold very briefly self-publishing on Amazon. It needs an extensive re-edit and reformatting, and one day it will see the light of day again in some form. As always, time and motivation is a factor in all of this. Energy is too. I only have so many hours of every day that aren't devoted to sleep or working my current job.

I did reflect on this mentally a few days ago, though -- I do not know where almost any of the people I worked with at that grocery store are now. I am sure some of them have since died (I know for a fact that two of them -- older folks -- indeed have). I'm sure many of the others have retired or have since moved on, moved away, etc. And yet, I am almost certain that some of them are still working there. I don't know for sure as I have not stepped foot in that store once since I left that job, moved back to Kansas City, and then to Newton later that year. I have not even been in that city in fifteen years. And most of the people I worked with there were either kids -- my age at the time or far younger -- or were on their last job before they retired anyway. There were a lot of what I call "transient" employees -- people who would be hired and would work for a few weeks or months, then get fired for doing something stupid or would just up and leave and never come back. We likely went through close to 100 cashiers/stockers while I was working there for three short years. 

During that time the store also changed ownership, changed its name and its colors, changed some of its management, and changed its hours. I don't even know if the store still exists, to be honest with you, or if it's now owned and operated by yet a different company with a different name. Again, I've not been there in fifteen years.

There are but three people I worked with there who I am still friends with on Facebook. Two of them were fellow night-shift employees who were far younger than I, and both of them now have 2-3 kids and are working in completely different fields. The third disabled his Facebook profile some time ago and hasn't been online since, but he also left the job before I did -- like, a year before I did. 

Likely some of my best regular customers are now dead as well -- at this juncture most of them would be in their 70s or 80s if they are still alive, and if they are alive they're likely not stopping at the grocery store every night after work like they used to. 

People come into and leave our lives in waves, it seems. I can't remember the last time I talked to anyone I went to grad school with, and some of those folks were in my wedding. I try to keep in contact on a regular basis with the few close friends I still have, and even at times that can be difficult if my social energy -- or energy in general -- is low. It got to the point that during my last two visits to West Virginia there were old friends I didn't even bother to contact because I knew they wouldn't respond or wouldn't want to see me while I was there, or they wouldn't have time to see me, or they now lived in different parts of the country (much like myself). 

No, I don't know when I'll be back to WV again. With my grandmother now long dead and with my parents living in North Carolina full-time, I don't really have any reason to go back aside from for nostalgia's sake -- and nostalgia itself is not enough to fly back home for a "visit" given airline prices.

Just for funsies, I looked up the price of the same trip to NC on the same days, but flying from Omaha into Morgantown instead. Round trip economy is about $475-600+ per person. Yeah, not planning a trip back home anytime soon, but it's fun to look at. 

I honestly don't know what I'd even do back home. Sure, there's family still there that I could see, and there are a few friends still around the area -- all of them are Trump supporters and if he wins in November that would be a very uncomfortable visit for both Daisy and myself. My parents aren't there anymore. There's some shopping, restaurants, and touring of Morgantown I'd love to do with Daisy but we did a fair amount of that when we drove out there in 2017. I just think it would be a very lonely, very hollow (no, ahem, puns intended here) trip to make. My best memories of West Virginia are better left in the past. 

Anyway, I've gotten far off track.

My point was, circling back to it now after a few relative pages of inner thoughts, is that I need to find a focus in my life and something to center myself that isn't work-related. I need to get away from the job I currently have and need to get into something new that isn't too difficult to learn or acquire yet will pay me the same amount or far more than I'm making now. I need to get out on the open road in a vehicle of my own, preferably something old and fast. I need to get out of Omaha before I can no longer climb out of the rut this city has put me in and get to a coastline somewhere, permanently. I turn 42 this year and I may be finally entering into my "midlife crisis."

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

 A few weeks ago -- perhaps a month now -- Daisy decided to color her hair.

Mind you, she'd gotten a haircut in Nova Scotia. She always does now if she can (Mama did too, the next day), because she really likes the stylist there up on Cape Breton Island, and as everyone in rural Nova Scotia seems to know each other, whether by familial relation or by being friends or friends of friends, the two gentlemen who run the salon have a long history with a good chunk of the family. For the past few years, that history has now added Daisy into the mix -- so when we're up there, she calls them and makes an appointment. 

Also mind you, Daisy has had a few different hair colors over the years -- even since we've been together. She took it very red for a while (and I mean, Irish red) and also took it completely black for a while. Her normal hair color is medium brown, like mine, with some grays here and there. 

I mean, we're getting old; I have a lot more gray in my hair than Daisy does. Well, I used to. I'll get to that.

This time around though, Daisy wanted to do something wildly different. So, shortly after we got home, one day while I was asleep she went to Sally Beauty Supply, got three different colors of Manic Panic dye, and a bleaching kit.

She did of course tell me she was going to do this beforehand, so it wasn't a surprise or anything.

That night, she bleached out her hair -- which even after her haircut, was still impressively long -- and dyed her hair dark blue, green, and pink to achieve a sort of rainbow effect. She touched it up here and there over the course of a week or so and let some of the pink fade to be replaced by more blue (which gave it a bit of a purple sheen). 

It honestly looks really good on her. It's very girl-power, punk-rock and I think all she needs is a vegan leather jacket, some black lipstick and some black nail polish to really pull off the look, were she to want to do that. It's also on the cusp of hippie, as it looks like tie-dye as well. I'm not a huge fan of the green in it (I think it's too light and ends up looking like green-tinted blonde) but the way the colors mixed together are gorgeous.

Now, mind you, I have wanted to color my hair something wild for years. I wanted to do it in high school and college, and I never did -- well, in college I did bleach it and have blonde hair with frosted tips that grew out over a year or so.

The early 2000s were a weird time, okay?

I remember a few years back where I mentioned to my boss -- even well after we began working at home -- that I wanted to dye my hair a wild color and get even more tattoos (at the time, I only had the Starfleet tattoo on my arm, I believe) -- he told me that would likely not be a great idea because sooner or later, we would return to an office setting where that sort of wild hair likely would not be allowed in any form by the corporate overlords.

Fast forward to 2024 when our company has closed down all of its buildings and offices in Omaha and most of its workforce is fully, and permanently, remote -- at least stateside, anyway. Including me. 

Anyway.

I was particularly drawn to the blue in Daisy's hair. If I would have colored my hair anything over the years, it would have been blue. Aside from black, deep/dark midnight purple, and forest green, dark/navy blue has always been my favorite color. I didn't want black hair, and after seeing how light/faded the green in Daisy's hair got really quickly, I didn't want green hair either. I'd look like the Joker. Dark purple was an option but I also did not want it to fade out quickly to look more like a pale lavender. This left me with blue. But I didn't know what blue I wanted. Daisy's blue was a little dark, but vibrant -- not exactly the shade that I was looking for. I looked up a darker shade, a blue-black variant called Blue Panther, which I was very interested in but was afraid it would end up looking too metallic or too black.

Daisy was all-in on this idea, and was thrilled to help with it. I ran some colors by her, asked her which bleaching kit she'd gotten and used, and about a week later I pulled the trigger on a bleaching kit and a single jar of Manic Panic's "Voodoo Blue" hair dye. "Voodoo Blue" is a medium blue -- not sky blue, light turquoise or teal, but not dark midnight blue or ocean blue. It's a straight up middle-of-the-road blue. Smurf blue. 

Over the course of an hour or so, we went through the process of bleaching my hair, making me look like Guy Fieri for a short time:

And then applying the blue dye to it. Thickly, meticulously, and letting it sit to absorb for another hour or so. During this time, I shaved off the beard because I was concerned, at the time, of how different it would look to have a beard of my normal hair color(s) with "Voodoo Blue" hair. I was afraid it would clash badly. And there's no way in hell I was going to dye my beard blue. I'm not a weirdo.

The final result, after washing and rinsing?

It is darker than the photo makes it look. Or at least it was at the time anyway, over two weeks ago now. In certain light it looked much darker, and in certain light it looked much lighter. Maybe that's why it was called "voodoo" blue. 

So far, I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out -- though I did learn some things in the process.

The first thing I learned is that when you color your hair a weird, unnatural color, you should absolutely wear shirts that are a similar color for a while, and I truly hope your pillowcases are a color that it blends with. There will be color loss and color transfer, and it will be a lot for the first few days after you do it. 

Similarly, it will wash out, a lot, with every shower for about a week. My tub has been lightly tinted blue for some time now. I've been using blue or dark blue towels and nothing else ever since. After that first week, it does not wash out a lot every shower, but more slowly and gradually. 

It also fades. It is a semi-permanent hair color, which means that as your hair grows out and you wash it and it is rinsed out a little more here and there, the colors will indeed fade and lighten. Mine has since faded out quite a bit over the course of the past 2-3 weeks where it's a much lighter, almost sky-blue color now (well, perhaps a little darker than that). 

I expected the process to wreck/fry my hair and make it feel like straw, which it did when I bleached my hair in college. It thankfully did not -- my hair still feels normal. Daisy says that's because there are a lot of conditioners in the bleach/dye process now to help prevent that while coloring. 

Here's a photo from a week ago today:

It's a bit lighter than that now, but you get the idea. 

I planned for this, of course, and a week after we dyed my hair I went back on Amazon and I did order the "Blue Panther" blue-black jar of dye. I also ordered a jar of "Ultra Violet" to mix in a bit when that fades, and so that Daisy can go purple too. 

I can't believe, looking back on it now, that it took me forty-one years on this planet before I pulled the trigger on dyeing my hair a wild, punk-rock color. 

Something else I learned -- dyeing your hair covers up all the grays. Who would've guessed?

Um, probably anyone of age who's ever colored their hair for that exact reason?

I never even thought about it, really. 

Today or tomorrow, depending on time and/or energy, we're going to put the "Blue Panther" in my hair on top of the rapidly-lightening blue. I think the mix of colors will go really well, and I'm excited. I also want to make sure that it's in there and fully-bonded to my hair (read: not washing a lot of color out and staining the tub every day) before we go to visit my parents in North Carolina next month. The last thing I want is to stain their tub blue when I shower there, and I think a month or so is a good amount of time to have that not happen, a good amount of time to have it not end up leaving a blue tint on the pillowcases in their guest room we sleep in, etc. 

That trip is indeed coming up soon; I have alerted my team at work to it and have calculated the PTO I need. Plane tickets are purchased and confirmed, rental car is reserved and confirmed. My bag is already most of the way packed (because that's the person I am). One more month and I can finally leave this state for a few days of quiet decompression time with my family as we make the headlong rush into fall and into the holiday season.

The Recovery Cycle

 We returned home on June 29. Today, as I write this, it is July 27. 

Obviously, a lot of things have happened since we returned home.

The first -- and likely most important -- is that we did get the air conditioner fixed. But it did take four days after we returned home, in sweltering Omaha July temperatures, to get the tech to do it. In the interim, Daisy could no longer take it and went to one of the stores in the area (Lowe's, Home Depot, somewhere like that) and got a portable air conditioner unit. Not the kind that you install in a window, but one about the size of R2-D2 that sits on the floor in a room and vents to a window. It was not cheap, but instead of it being 85 in our master bedroom at all times, it made the room a comfortable 65 at almost all times. She took it downstairs and hooked it up in the living room too, when we were both down there. 

Our actual air conditioner? Compressor blew out on it. It was a fix that took less than an hour, and Daisy had the repairman install a new wall thermostat for us as well -- one that works far better and actually has pressable buttons that you don't have to jam with a butter knife to get them to register (yeah, that was our old thermostat). We were going to get one anyway, and I'd actually gotten a Lowe's gift card as a credit card reward perk to go get it with -- Daisy was able to use that for other things, fortunately. Since then we've had a comfortable, live-able house again. But I will say that those four mid-summer days without AC were no joke -- it got above 90 in my upstairs office every day and never got below 80 in the downstairs at night...where I was forced to immediately return to work as I was now fully out of PTO to use after the trip. 

Since our return, we've noticed a sea change in the cats' behavior; Empress has become much more lovey with both Daisy and myself, Mable has become far more rambunctious, violent (like Pete was as a kitten -- it's a black cat thing) and independent, and Hank has formed a sort of kinship with Sadie and checks on her when he can tell she's not feeling well, hides with her when she's scared (fireworks, etc -- the 4th of July happened right after we came home of course), and lays with her or next to her far more now. Not cuddling or anything, but they're definitely closer than they were before. He will give her little kisses on her head or nose, and it's really cute.

Pete, unfortunately, has had a massive spike in his anxiety levels. I'm sure part of that is because we were gone so long, but part of it is because he cannot be left alone by the other cats when he goes to the pan -- the kittens all act like they're the potty police or something. They do it to Sadie too, and she does not like it at all. Pete has sprayed on doors and walls and Sadie has had accidents because of their potty-policing, which isn't every time they go to the pan(s), but is enough to really mess with them at times. 

Pete also developed a large abscess on his inner front leg that we had to take him in for and get drained/antibiotics and pain pills given to him for it. It looked like a hot spot at first, but his incessant chewing at it (again, anxiety) did not help it and it became a big open wound that swelled up around the spot in question. It didn't seem to hurt him or keep him from walking/moving around normally, but we wanted to make sure he would heal and that it wasn't something more serious like cat cancer or something, so Daisy took him in. It has completely healed up now, and aside from the small bare spot on his leg, you never would've known he had it. 

Sadie, I am afraid, is on her last legs and last few weeks or months of life. She seems very lethargic and not all there a lot of the time. She eats like a hog and drinks like a fish (so her body/digestive system is still working at least) but she has somewhat frequent diarrhea and vomits up what looks like saliva or bile several times a week. She is still a very loving, wants-to-be-with-you cat, and snuggles up to us, Pete, and occasionally Emmy every day, but it's becoming very clear that -- like Maggie -- her time is coming soon. Could be another few weeks or months, could be a few days. We don't know. When she takes that turn for the worse, as Maggie did, we will know that it's time, and as painful as it will be, we will do what must be done to end her suffering. Sadie is 17 and the second-oldest -- only Pete is older -- and she has lived a very long, good life. I knew once Maggie went that it would only be a matter of time until her sister and Pete followed suit. It's a sad reality to face, but we'll have to do it with all of these cats eventually. 

And yet I feel conflicted on all of it. I love these old cats -- Pete and Sadie -- and I've had them their entire lives, I will be very sad when they go, but I can't say I also won't be relieved. Pete's anxiety and his spraying is very stressful for both Daisy and me and he can be an absolute menace when he incessantly howls for no reason, or goes after Sadie hard for no reason, or decides that he wants to beg for food or treats from us and when we don't give him anything he will lock eyes with us and piss on something -- or threaten to. I don't like having to keep the old man drugged at almost all times (gabapentin and melatonin, and sometimes CBD for cats) just to have him act like some semblance of a normal cat. Similarly, Daisy doesn't like having to steam-clean the living room carpet multiple times a month because Pete attacks Sadie and Sadie's defensive response is to spray piss, a lot of piss, everywhere while she's under attack. The three kittens may be goblins, but they don't do any of those things and are actually quite normal -- relatively speaking, of course.

So, yes, there will be a lot of relief and stress lifted from us, even though there will be a lot of sadness. And it feels really bad, really mean and cold to say that, but it's still true. Pete is Daisy's baby and Sadie has always been my shadow -- I am very much her person -- but it's still true. 

Pete and Hank went in for their yearly checkups/shots on Thursday, and we found out definitively how much heavier and really, larger Hank now is than his aging, anxious older brother. Hank is now the largest, heaviest cat in the house -- built like a dumptruck and still as lovey as the day we brought him home. He is 13.5 pounds. Pete is 11.5 pounds. Both of our boys are healthy as expected. Pete's still old and is still in kidney failure, but he's still doing well enough health-wise. Hank, who has an enlarged heart and had a bad allergic/asthmatic reaction to something back around Christmas, has not had any incidents since and the vet says his heart is strong, normal, and with no murmurs. So there's that.

We have now had Hank for well over a year -- his adoption day anniversary was July 15.

Meanwhile, Empress is catching up to him in size (though not yet in weight) and it seems like Mable doubled in size while we were in Canada, as she is now almost as big as Sadie. There are times when I will confuse her for Pete because she's getting so big. 

Anyway.

I returned to work the day after we came home to find that July at my job is miserable; I have hated nearly every day since returning from vacation, and many mornings I have found myself stuck working up to almost an hour late because of the sheer idiocy that has to be dealt with by someone, and if I don't do it nobody else will. 

I have mentioned only to my very close and trusted friends and coworkers -- all three of them, out of a group of nearly fifty -- that my goal is to be out of this job and on to another one as soon as possible. If not by Labor Day, then definitely by the holidays. I will cross my ten-year point in this job in less than a month, and for almost eight years of that I have been in the same position doing the same thing every night with no hope or opportunity for advancement or betterment of myself, my station in life, or in my position within the company/program hierarchy. I am making $18,000 more now, per year, than the day I started back in 2014... and honestly, that being the only benefit does not feel like nearly enough after one-and-a-half promotions, three schedule changes, and the fact that my presence can at times literally keep the program together and keep it from collapsing. My company is making a lot of changes behind the scenes, shifting some work outside of the country and moving a lot of long-time employees to other programs or groups. I have been assured by my higher leadership that I am fine and am not going anywhere, but have also been told in a thinly-veiled way by that same leadership to save every hour of PTO that I earn and don't use, and not to put in for some days/times I do use because I work far longer and harder in that place than most others do, and in Nebraska if you lose your job it is state law that all earned/accrued PTO gets paid out to you.

On one hand it is definitely reassuring to know that I'm appreciated and highly valued, while on the other hand -- make no mistake -- being told that bit about PTO so nonchalantly is highly frightening. Do I expect to lose my job? No. Do I expect it to possibly, with or without much warning, to change from one position to another internally and for me lose all the experience I have for the past decade to shift gears into something I may hate way more and start over on? Yes, eventually. At this point my place of employment really does seem like it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic more than it ever has felt like that before. I could be wrong, but for a multitude of reasons I cannot lose my job right now. If I get a whiff that something bad is coming down the pipe, I need to jump ship into something else and fast.

I could be wrong, though. Who knows. All I can do is login every night, do the best I can while I'm on the proverbial clock, and live through it all day by day.

Now, I told you all of the above so that I can now tell you this, with the deepest irony possible -- before I had that PTO conversation with my higher leadership, I had already booked plane tickets for us to go visit my parents in North Carolina again next month.

I booked the tickets a week after we returned from Canada. I will have more than enough PTO to cover the several-day-trip down there to see them by the time it rolls around. I just won't have much PTO for anything else for the rest of the year -- maybe a couple of days around Christmas/my birthday and/or if I get sick.

This wasn't a decision made on a whim -- I wanted to plan a trip to see my parents again back in the spring, as you are aware. However, Daisy was sick and we had, ahem, a series of unfortunate events happen one thing after another (see the run of "2024 Can Suck It" posts from earlier this year) and we never got around to figuring out a schedule for it. By the time the spring rolled around, we were already through it and into the summer, and then we were in Canada, and now we're here.

I cleared it with my parents -- I wanted to make sure the time we would visit would also be good for them, and that they wouldn't be up in West Virginia or anything like that during the one stretch of days I could get cleared to make the trip. They won't be, and they're excited to see us. I told Daisy I would take care of the bookings of flights and that since it'll still be summer and we'll only be there a few short days, all we need are a couple of outfits in our backpacks -- she could focus on that and book the rental car, which she has a deep-discount corporate code for.

With me dealing with everything else, I picked the best seats possible on American Airlines (boo, hiss) because to fly Delta it was double the price, picked the best arrival/departure times, and booked a flight directly into Wilmington, NC instead of into Raleigh (which would require a few hours of driving). Wilmington is less than an hour from my parents' place. I also made sure we locked in a seat-selection guarantee so that I don't have sore knees/joints the entire trip, got trip insurance, and made sure the tickets were completely cancelable with a full refund in the event something were to happen between now and then. Our flight from Omaha takes us into Charlotte for a short layover, and then to Wilmington. Our flight home takes us from Wilmington into Chicago/O'Hare for another short layover, and then back to Omaha. We leave in the middle of the day both times and arrive in the early evening hours both times -- no super-early mornings, no arriving-home-at-11pm bullshit this time around. 

These options weren't cheap. But, comfortability, peace-of-mind, and not needing to check bags because we don't need anything extra when my parents have a washer/dryer is immensely helpful. I do not need souvenirs or more t-shirts from North Carolina, I got enough of them last year. We're not taking food with us there or back, more than likely (with the exception of, maybe, some Utz chips). We just need us, some light toiletries, and a couple of outfits to cycle through. Beach clothing. Flip-flops. It'll still be summer in North Carolina -- very much so. It was in the mid-90s every day when we were there last year and I do not expect that to be much different this year. Luckily, my parents have good air conditioning.

Daisy was not thrilled when I told her how much the tickets were. They were a few hundred dollars more than she would have spent on them, to be fair, and a few hundred more than I originally quoted her (prices change). But, I was organizing this trip, I was and am in charge of it, and I don't want to fly out of here at the asscrack of dawn or arrive home way after dark. I don't want to fly through certain airports, have multi-hour layovers sitting in an airport where I can't vape or afford to get something to eat, or spend hours driving in the dark before we even get to our destination -- once I get off the plane I want it to be the shortest time/distance possible before I'm inside my parents' house on the island. I don't want to check bags or carry more than we need, or make grandiose plans we don't get the time to follow through on (and certainly don't have the energy to). I wanted to guarantee we'd get the most comfortable seats possible on the planes so that I don't hurt for the several days we'll be there, as they will be active days -- beaching, stairs, lots of walking, etc. More than anything else I wanted to make sure that in case of a crisis or emergency that I would be able to cancel everything and get a full refund put riiiiiiight back onto my credit card, because I 100% know how shitty our luck has been this year.

So, everything's set, and in a little more than a month we will venture to North Carolina once more. Daisy was able to get a great deal on the rental car -- no, we did not get another Spaceship Van™ this year because there was no point to it -- instead she got us a simple vehicle, which will likely end up being another Chevy Malibu or something along those lines. We only need it for a few days and it's not like we're hauling cargo or anything with it. 

I am excited. Well, relatively so. Being on the island with my parents does allow me some decompression time. 

I honestly just need some time for everything to stop bending us over the table and fucking us. I don't mean to sound crass when I say that, but it's really how I feel this year. Can 2024 stop fucking us, please? Daisy and I both have had what I would call an exceptionally shitty year, with both of us getting railed by life in many, many ways. We've had to deal with or otherwise overcome more problems this year than in any other year of our relationship or marriage -- not between us, really, but in general. Something will come along and fuck me, then something will come along and fuck her, and then something will come along and double-fuck us both, and then the cycle repeats. And it's all just getting so tiring. I just wanted something nice and relaxing. The Canada trip was fun, but it was decidedly not relaxing. And it was incredibly expensive -- to put it into perspective, between groceries, gas, and the clothing and other items we brought home, I put more on my credit card than it was to get the plane tickets to North Carolina. By a lot. It's not going to break us financially but I wanted a trip that I was in control of, that I had a say in the timeframes of and the travel schedule for, to a destination of my choosing to see my family.