Holidays 2024, Part III: Four More Years of Darkness

So, I mean, here we are, I guess.

I haven't written about November 5th here yet (or as I will call it moving forward, Black Tuesday) because I could not really put my thoughts down in writing about it. 

Time and again this country has shown its true colors. Time and again this country has failed to stand up and fight for what is morally right, what is logically right, what is truly patriotic and would progress our people in the most rational and levelheaded ways. 

Instead, they choose to rally behind a failed businessman with a spray tan, 34 felonies, multiple rape accusations, a bad comb-over, and former reality television host with dictatorial aspirations.

For a second time. 

That above is, of course, the very short list too. 

You know, after eight years of George W. Bush, when Obama was elected I began to regain hope and pride in my country again. A country that could elect a black man as president, a man who was truly presidential and likely overall the best and most stable president of my lifetime, I thought deserved and even warranted hope.

In 2016 when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were running for the Democratic nomination, I was thrilled -- two very progressive candidates, both with extensive political experience and with high hopes and big plans on what they could do for this country to propel it forward and make it the most respectable place in the world again -- were vying for my vote.

Then it started to go downhill quickly. The DNC did some rather sneaky shit (look it up if you don't believe me) that basically kicked Sanders out of the running and stopped him from being the nominee, and once Hillary became the nominee I was jaded by the process -- especially once her really inspiring campaigning basically stopped. And all of this happened during the rise of Donald Trump, out of a large sea of potential Republican candidates -- the most unlikely candidate of all of them who was never expected to actually win the GOP nomination. He was the exact antithesis of Clinton, even more so than he would be to his future opposing candidates in the other two elections he'd run in in 2020 and 2024. He became a novelty, a clown, a candidate those who weren't tied to the establishment were like "let's vote for him, how bad could he actually be?"

In the summer of 2015, Daisy and I visited her family in Nova Scotia for the first time. Her grandfather, who was still alive then, had a conversation with me at the dining room table -- just the two of us -- regarding the upcoming election the next year. I told him, and I quote, "he will run, and he will win, because Americans are fucking stupid."

A little over a year later, I was proven right. 

A lot was said during and after the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was an "unlikeable" or "untrustworthy" candidate. I voted for her not necessarily because I really wanted to, but because I wanted to vote against Donald Trump. I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders, and I believed the party did him dirty.

It made no difference.

In 2020, after a really strong initial campaign, Sanders once again dropped out. I voted for him in the Nebraska state primary, very proudly. By the time the votes were tallied he was already out of the race. In the actual election, of course, I voted for Joe Biden -- I wasn't incredibly enthusiastic about Biden, but he was, again, not Donald Trump. I was thrilled when he won.

And then January 6 happened, and then once Biden took over everything he really tried to do was stonewalled by Republicans, and then the student loan forgiveness stuff I've been waiting for to be pushed through for years got stonewalled and basically shut down, and every time I saw the man in an interview, on television, or during a State of the Union he looked older, more tired, and more defeated.

Then came the disastrous debate (which happened while we were on Prince Edward Island, actually, so I didn't get to see it), and a few weeks later he dropped out in favor of Kamala Harris taking the reins.

I must admit I wasn't a huge Kamala fan in 2020. But, the way she got Democrats to rally around her this summer and fall, the way she was able to unite everyone in the ways that mattered, the fact that she picked a VP candidate in Walz who everyone wanted to be the country's Dad -- all of that gave me some hope. In the days leading up to the election, I was actually really filled with hope, hope that maybe we'd be able to finally have our first female president, maybe we'd be able to pull ourselves up out of the nightmare of three Trump candidacies in a row and say goodbye to the orange goblin forever. 

On election night I was soundly proven wrong, watching state by state by state fall to Trump one after another, all night long, while I only halfway paid attention to work. It was the third election night in a row I would spend at work, but watching the television more than focusing on my tasks. 

Somewhere around 2am or so -- I honestly can't remember when as I had, by this time, entered into what I call a "fugue state of panic" -- it was called for Trump, and never changed. We would, again, be plunging into four years of darkness. None of the numbers made sense to me. None of the statistics were adding up. Nothing that had been a near-certainty was anymore. 

For the past two weeks I've been in a low-level state of shock, I think. I want anyone who is outside the US and reading this to know that no matter how it may look from the outside, most of us do not want a second Trump presidency. Additionally, none of us in that group wanted the first one either. We are a global embarrassment. I am deeply disappointed in the other half of my country, and disgusted by them. This is not the America I want, not the America I want to be proud of -- not the America I grew up in. You can say a lot of things about Reagan and Bush Sr. and Dubya, but none of them were insane. They were respectful, rational human beings who were not assholes, and they were not felons -- all of them were immensely qualified for leadership in many ways.  

The entire system though is problematic. It's dismaying. But, oh well, who knows whether it will even exist in four years? Who knows what rights will be stripped away and what darkness we will face moving forward as we slowly further slide towards a fascist dictatorship.

"But Brandon," you may be saying, "do you really believe things will get that bad?"

I honestly don't know. I can't be certain of anything anymore. And I think that's where this sense of impending doom, this dread, this constant anxiety is coming from -- nothing makes sense anymore. It all feels like a sick joke.

Things I am almost 100% sure of? World War III will start within the next year or two. Prices on everything will rise because of tariffs. Millions of people will lose their jobs. "Political enemies" of the administration will be taken out in not-so-subtle ways. There will be food shortages, supply chain breakdowns, and major infrastructure issues. People will lose their homes. People will lose their healthcare. People will not be able to afford gasoline or prescription drugs to take care of their long-running medical conditions. The state will try to force religion and religious values on everyone for everything. It's going to suck very much to be an American.

For the first time, I have seriously been considering other options for relocation and employment in another country. I know it's weighing heavy on Daisy's mind too. However, we can't really do that and leave her parents behind here. I've floated the idea of doing it just for the next four years -- putting the bulk of our actual stuff in storage and just finding four years' worth of temporary work somewhere -- and then coming back, but that seems even less feasible. Also, it's not like you can just up and leave immediately, with five cats, to live in Europe somewhere -- that is so very much harder than it sounds, and requires a lot of money. 

So what do we do? I honestly don't know. It's really hard for me to shake the feelings of impending doom I have. Daisy feels much the same way. Do we just march on in silent resistance? Do we just detach from everything regarding news and politics for the next four years and bury ourselves in work and hobbies? Do we stand up and fight what we already know is an absolutely losing battle? I have no idea. 

Selling One's Soul

A few weeks ago, one of my friends posted this list on Facebook. I thought it was extremely laughable, as I think most lists like this are. So, as I am prone to do sometimes, let's do a good old fashioned deconstruction!

BY AGE 40 YOU SHOULD BE SMART ENOUGH TO REALIZE THIS:

...For grammar's sake, it should be "these things," but y'know, whatever -- like the internet has ever cared about proper grammar.

1. Someone makes 10x more than you do in a 9-5 job because they have more "leverage" with their work.

Someone makes 10x more than I do in a 9-5 job because they got lucky, slept their way to the top, had better opportunities or privileges growing up (i.e. they weren't born in a backwater state and didn't live on top of a mountain until they were 24), had better ideas than most people, had financial backing from a relative/corporation/angel investor that fell in their lap, or took risks that 95% of others wouldn't take -- again, see the "they got lucky" above. "Leverage" almost never has anything to do with it. Privilege does.

2. Distraction is the greatest killer of success. It stunts and destroys your brain.

Distraction is necessary so that you don't become a fucking zombie or spend your life as an incurable workaholic. Rest and relaxation is indeed important. Downtime is important. Vacations are important. Love, family, and stability are all important. If you don't have any of these things, you'll be a pretty miserable person.

3. You shouldn't take advice from people who are not where you want to be in life.

You shouldn't take advice from almost anyone unless you can directly utilize and either exploit or build upon it to better yourself or your family -- without repercussions or downsides. In general, take any advice with a grain of salt, or an entire shaker.

4. No one is coming to save your problems. Your life's 100% your responsibility.

Well, that's the damnable misery of it, isn't it? And for a lot of people, I cannot think of anything more absolutely, devastatingly depressing. There are people I know who have done everything possible to try to better themselves and their station in life and have gotten absolutely nowhere despite their best efforts and best intentions. There are also people I know who have turned around their entire lives with a simple decision they made one day when they woke up. Point is, not everyone can do that -- it again boils down to luck, opportunity, and privilege, which is 100% outside of most peoples' control.

5. You don't need 100 self-help books, all you need is action and self discipline.

And money. And opportunity. And luck. And privilege. This list was very clearly written by someone who had all of these things. 

6. Unless you went to college to learn a specific skill (ie. doctor, engineer, lawyer), you can make 

more money in the next 90 days just learning sales.

Which is really, really goddamned sad. Because unfortunately, this one is likely correct. But I don't want to sell my soul to sell items or policies, or concepts, or insurance to benefit yet another corporate overlord, not to mention that I don't want to victimize the public or have my entire worth in whatever career I choose be boiled down to numbers or metrics. This may be the most depressing thing on this list. Does anyone really want to do this with their life? Anyone? Are there people out there who are like "I was put on this planet to sell things that people don't need to people with too much money to care?" What a shallow, hollow existence that must be. 

7. No one cares about you. So stop being shy, go out and create your chances.

Okay, all kidding aside, this one I mostly agree with. You'll probably fail, because this world is a miserable and awful place, but go for the gusto. You can at least say you tried.

8. If you find someone smarter than you, work with them, don't compete.

Something I have learned, continually, my entire life is...there will ALWAYS be someone smarter than you. A lot of us "smart people" did not get fully hit with this realization until we went to college. Working with them IS indeed an option. But, if you can find a way to make them work for you -- as in, a way to benefit from being associated with them, or can find a way to make them roll up to you in a command structure in a support capacity...then how smart are they, really? Of course, the other option remains to not compete with them whatsoever, but to best them and/or crush them.

9. Smoking has 0 benefit in your life. This habit will only slow your thinking and lower your focus.

I agree, as a former smoker myself, that it has zero actual benefit and was absolutely detrimental to my health -- but never once did it slow my thinking or lower my focus, or affect my sense of self. Some of the best creative work I've ever done -- writing, art, etc. -- was done while slowly chain-smoking through a pack of cigarettes and drinking a pot of coffee. I'm not endorsing smoking here of course, but I'm saying that it doesn't kill everyone and doesn't affect everyone in a wholly negative fashion.

10. Comfort is the worst addiction and cheap ticket to depression.

Vehemently disagree here. Constant uncomfortability, lack of stability in one's finances/health/love life or learning/career path is your ticket to depression. Constantly fighting to keep what you have and never seeming to break even -- or worse, only breaking even with no progress and an endless cycle of grind with no end in sight...THAT, my friend, is depressing. Let me tell you, I worked hard for many years to get where I am, and that process was depressing as fuck. But, once I could get my finances stabilized, once my career stabilized, and once I married a good woman, you know what happened? About 90% of the things I was previously depressed about went away, as did the actual depression. Comfort is not a ticket to depression; it is, in fact, the opposite. You have to be at least mostly happy to be comfortable. 

11. Don't tell people more than they need to know, respect your privacy.

Unless telling people more than they need to know will somehow benefit you in the long run, this one is mostly true. 

12. Avoid alcohol at all cost. Nothing worse than losing your senses and acting a fool.

Just like everything else, there is a time and a place for alcohol. It is not all the time, but sometimes you need -- truly need -- to just lose your senses and act a fool. Just because you occasionally drink does not automatically deem you an unfit or unwell person. And it also doesn't mean you lose your senses and act a fool when you do drink. People are allowed to be people. So much of this list basically sounds like "by the age of 40, you should know better than to do anything you actually enjoy that makes life worth living."  And I say this as a recovered alcoholic myself -- I stopped drinking in my 20s, and can count on one hand the number of alcoholic drinks of anything I have had in the past decade. But you know what? I'm not going to tell people they can't live their lives and drink if they want to. In fact, if I wanted to keep in the true spirit of this rather spiteful list, I would say "let everyone drink as much as they want -- it will destroy those who can't handle it and weaken the rest so you can conquer them." But I'm also not that big of an asshole. 

13. Keep your standards high and don't settle for something because it's available.

Except there's a point where this has to stop, right? You can't always be like "no, that's not good enough for me" or you will end up a truly miserable person that no one and nothing can satisfy. You have to truly know yourself and know your wants and needs out of life before you can set your standards. Not everything is a competition and there are, indeed, some things you can settle for and be happy with, because if your standards are set too high, you will never achieve them. Also, bonus fact -- some people will never achieve their goals in life even if their standards are moderately low or reasonable. That's just how shit is; that is life. 

14. The family you create is more important than the family you come from.

Look, while I mostly agree with this, it is also just as problematic. I know a lot of people who have created or joined "problematic" families -- whether by choice or by circumstance. This is another one of those situations where you really have to know yourself and who you really are, and who you want to associate yourself with (or be associated with). For example, a lot of my actual family back home in West Virginia are Trump supporters (mostly for all of the wrong reasons)* and because of that, I consider a lot of them toxic and don't really associate with them. But on the same side of that coin, you can also surround yourself with people who you don't believe are toxic or problematic and still be wrong. Choose who you associate with, family or otherwise, very carefully -- because you may find that sometimes it's better to not actually associate with anyone and to forge your own path free of a lot of those tribal connections.

15. Train yourself to take nothing personally to save yourself from 99.99% of mental problems.

But...there are some things that are absolutely meant for you to take personally. Part of living as a sentient being with emotional and actual intelligence is separating what is directed specifically at you from generalities. I'm not a fan of most criticism, constructive or otherwise -- few people are -- but sometimes people need to know, and to be outright told, that they're a fuck up or a fuckin' idiot and it is definitely meant personally. I am not immune to this either. But, to tie this to "99.99% of mental problems" is downright cruel and wrong. That also absolutely reeks of privilege. People don't choose their mental health -- just as an example, I know schizophrenics, depressives, and bipolars across the board, from many walks of life, who would give anything to be mentally well, mentally stable, to not have to worry about their next episode or when they'd start hearing voices again. Their mental health issues did not come from taking everything they were told personally -- that is an absolutely unhinged, uneducated, and able-ist assumption and approach to mental health and is simply wrong. 

*Note: I do not believe that there is any "right" reason to vote for Donald Trump -- but I do understand that there are many voters out there who honestly believe that he is the correct choice to lead this country again for a myriad of factors. I don't have to agree with their reasoning, nor do I have to support it -- and I very much do not. But, I understand their conviction. I understand they feel they are passionate American patriots and that their vote truly will better this country -- and to me, they are entitled to their incorrect opinions. 

That being said, there are people who voted for him for the exact wrong reasons -- things like "well, I don't like anyone who's not white either and want to deport all of the immigrants" or "I don't want a black Indian woman running my country" or "women shouldn't have rights and I can't wait until Trump and Jesus take them away again" or "trans people don't exist, and I don't like them gays neither" or "I want to be able to justify beating and abusing women again like it was in the old days" -- and to those people I say you are on the wrong side of history, and you will learn this soon enough.

Empress's First Birthday

 Nothing of substance in this post, just pictures from Empress's first birthday party (November 3).

She was thrilled. 

Holidays 2024, Part II: Gravy Season

We have yet to make plans for Thanksgiving this year -- we do not yet know if either of Daisy's sisters will be able to make it to town (one of them is on the move constantly, and the other has not yet confirmed with us whether she and the family will hit Omaha for the holiday or not). I have already taken the night before Thanksgiving and the following Sunday off work to stretch it into a five-day weekend for me, as I have the feeling I will need that breathing space regardless of what we do. 

And we are well into that lead-up now, aren't we? After all, Halloween is over now and as of yesterday afternoon (though it probably started in the morning) the local "we play everything" radio station 104.5 has now switched its broadcast to 24/7 Christmas music for the remainder of the year. 

It's too early, y'all. There are still turkeys and gravy to be consumed.

November 1 traditionally is the start of Gravy Season, a holiday season that if I didn't create it myself (I'm still not sure it was all me) I'm sure someone else would have at some point. I've been celebrating it, let's say, for about fifteen years give-or-take. It is a celebration of all things gravy and gravy-related, in a humorous fashion, as a counterpoint to the commercialism of Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Christmas. Honestly, I cannot have been the first person to come up with it -- there's just no way -- but it does seem to have taken off a lot over the past decade or so. Gravy Season runs until December 31st. 

And this year...I'm not exactly "feelin' it," so to speak.

Don't get me wrong, I still find it amusing, but I am just not into the holiday spirit yet. I think the election is weighing heavily on my mind, and I also think that I've been under a very large amount of stress for so long that it's really difficult to shift my mindset into something new and festive/fun at the moment. The weather isn't even really Novemberish yet:

Like, that's September weather, or early October weather at best. It's not the weather we should be having leading up to Thanksgiving. 

I'm not against this, mind you, but still. It doesn't feel like the holidays yet. And I think that's a big part of it. When I have to wear a coat when leaving the house for anything, or when I must wear socks and slippers and pajama pants in the house -- that's when I think it'll feel like the holidays are upon us.

Or when it snows for the first time.

Last year, it waited until after Thanksgiving to snow -- it was almost perfectly timed, actually. Thanksgiving last year was November 23. Our first snow was November 25. That snow sort of ushered in the real holiday season and got me into the mood for it. 

This year, Thanksgiving is late -- it's the 28th, which is almost the latest day it can actually be (y'know, because calendars). There's a non-zero chance we'll have snow before Thanksgiving Day, as we've had snow here in Omaha in early October before. I don't care about snow that much anymore; I don't have to be out in it most of the time for any real reason, and as long as my internet works and the power doesn't go out...fuck it, I'm fine here inside my warm house with the wife and the cats with a fridge and pantry full of food.

My Christmas shopping is essentially done; Daisy is getting what she asked for, and I've made tie-dyes for basically everyone else I'd send gifts to. I have to get a few little things for my parents still, and we'll likely pick up a few things for Daisy's parents here and there (we've already been doing this, off and on), but otherwise I've mostly finished. I have no real regrets, and I've stayed budget-conscious where possible. 

As I've also mentioned before, the Christmas cards are done. They were designed, ordered, delivered, and are awaiting Black Friday to begin being sent out -- with several sheets of new stamps to be used for them, too.

But the holiday spirit? I'm not feelin' it yet. And I don't know when or if it's going to come. 

I did get confirmation from Daisy this morning that yes, I can go ahead and do tie-dyes for the rest of the family -- her sister, our brother-in-law, and all five of their kids -- because yes, they will appreciate them. So I am not done yet, not by a long shot. That means I ordered several more packs of shirts this morning and a few more dye sets. My hopes are that I can be done, and I mean fully done, by Thanksgiving. Any leftover shirts I'll box away for following holidays such as birthdays and the like. Or maybe I'll give some out to some random folks or other friends for Christmas this year; I mean, I do have the shipping boxes already. I am guessing this will be part of the last real "Christmas shopping" I'll have to do for anyone. 

I've swapped out my wardrobes for the most part -- I moved the lighter shirts to the back and moved the sweaters, hoodies, and jacket-like shirts to the front. I have stored the vast majority of my shorts for the winter. I have put away all of my sandals except for the pair I'm wearing. Daisy has cleaned out the last of the garden and has performed her final harvest from it. I'm already getting push notifications from my Walmart app on the phone for early Black Friday deals. And, of course, the fall allergies have arrived for both of us -- they arrived weeks ago. 

My sleep schedules are very off and/or are somewhat haphazard -- I have not been sleeping that well during the daytime hours, and when I get to the weekend (the times where I don't have to sleep on a schedule because of work) it feels like anything goes for my body and I absolutely can pass out at any time for a long stretch of hours, usually in my chair. In the past 24 hours, I've slept almost 10 of them across two different sessions. I'll have to take another nap this afternoon/evening before I work tonight, too -- I can't stay up for a full 24+ hours anymore despite how hard I try sometimes. My body will absolutely no longer allow that. 

Holidays 2024, Part I: Sweet Demonic Ceremonies

 So, here we are.

In my life, the holidays start with Halloween and end with New Year's Day.

October 31: Halloween

November 1: The Start of Gravy Season

November 5: Election Day (maybe the last one the US will ever have)

November 28: Thanksgiving

December 20: My birthday

December 24: Christmas Eve

December 25: Christmas Day

December 31: New Year's Eve and the last day of Gravy Season

January 1: New Year's Day

And then four months of midwest snow, cold, and depressing darkness.

I told Daisy this afternoon that we really need to enjoy this next two weeks or so because they may be the last two weeks we really get to live in a free country. 

I've not made it a secret that I am not a Trump supporter. I am very concerned about what will happen in this country after the election on the 5th and way more concerned what will happen regardless of the vote outcome in January, when whoever is elected takes the reins. Because, no matter what, it will not be without controversy. It will also likely not be without violence and bloodshed. Halloween may be the last actual "holiday" we have in this country that seems normal if the less-informed, less-educated masses elect Trump again.

There's a lot of ballot initiatives, at least here in Nebraska, that need to pass too. One of them is medical marijuana, because of course Nebraska is 20+ years behind most of the rest of the country and are just now getting that on the ballot. Another one basically codifies Roe v. Wade again here in Nebraska. Still another one votes down public money being used for private schools (ahem, there's a reason private schools are private, and let's keep it that way please) along with various other tax initiatives and the like.

I could get into a long list of political stuff here but I won't; I'm sick to death of it myself and just want the brown woman instead of the orange man in the White House, so that my country doesn't collapse or descend into anarchy or civil war. Anything else is ancillary. 

This week, Daisy (finally) set up the Nintendo Switch I got her last year for Christmas and began actually using it.

Mind you, Daisy is not normally a huge fan of any sort of video games; she has a handful from her childhood with a SNES that she holds fond, nostalgic memories of, and that's about it. However, for the past three days she has been glued to the Switch and the games I got her for it whenever we've had any downtime whatsoever. This, honestly, I am happy about -- it's why I got it for her. I have my own Switch (a Switch Lite) that I keep upstairs in my office and play occasionally, but I wanted her to be able to sort of re-live her childhood again, the joy of getting a new game system and a bunch of games. She is a good wife, a wonderful wife, and she deserves to be able to detach from the world and dive into a game just like anyone else does. 

I have been very exhausted as of late and my body isn't really treating me well. I am pretty sure I have IBS -- irritable bowel syndrome -- and trust me when I tell you I am not a fan. It is not fun, it is not pleasant. It is painful and somewhat debilitating at times. My appetite has almost disappeared, and I'm sure I've lost some weight over the past two weeks or so. 

I'm sure part of it is likely the Trulicity regulating my body again as I'm once again getting my system used to it, but it was never this difficult before. I have but one month of it left before I will have to see my PCP for more bloodwork -- likely sometime in December -- before he'll refill it or any of my other meds again. I'm really just taking the way I feel day by day at this point; some days I'll feel just fine and others I will feel terrible -- low energy, strong nausea, every joint aching or in some sort of pain, and then there's the IBS on top of that. I'd like to chalk some of it up to allergies, especially the nausea and joint aches of it all -- from the seasons changing, etc. I somehow doubt, however, that's the overall causes of everything. It feels like my body is breaking down sometimes, like an old car with 300,000 miles -- the engine is tired, the transmission is slow and slipping (with discolored fluid) and the gas tank is full of sand and varnish. 

And some days I'll wake up and feel like a million bucks, with no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. 

Through it all, I am constantly tired -- I haven't been sleeping that well. I do sleep, of course, but it's usually in 5-6 hour spurts here and there throughout the work week. I like to nap on my lunch hours when I can, and on Thursday night I overslept my alarm by almost a full hour -- which has never happened before. I'm now terrified I'm going to go to lunch one night and wake up at 8am to numerous calls and messages asking what happened to me. That's generally a fire-able offense, and I really really need my job right now. 

I think part of it is that this year has just worn me down in so many ways, and at this juncture it's really catching up to me. I'm usually pretty unfazed and pretty unbothered, but 2024 has been quite brutal, as I've covered here before earlier this year -- and that's just the stuff that I've actually written about. There is a lot more I've kept very private for various reasons.

So, with all of this in mind, we attended a friend's Goth Wedding™ on Halloween a couple of days ago.

I've talked about this before here and I've also mentioned that I am not particularly a huge fan of attending weddings or funerals -- both tend to be highly emotional events and both tend to affect others a lot, but me not so much. When people get married, they get married. When people die, they die. I don't tend to cry for either one. 

This wedding, however, was important -- because as small as it was, both Daisy and I were heavily involved. Our mutual friend getting married we both worked with and have been friends with for over a decade. Daisy took her engagement photos for her, and would be taking the wedding photos. I became an ordained minister in the event that I would need to perform the ceremony. I didn't need to, but still.

And, for the record, I'm all for nontraditional weddings. The last wedding before this one we attended was -- and I'm not kidding here -- a Harry Potter-themed wedding, where all the guests were encouraged to dress in their own house colors, wear costumes if they so chose, etc. The minister was dressed as Dumbledore. It was...interesting. 

When I learned that the theme of this Halloween wedding would be...well, for lack of a better term, Halloween themed, I got excited. I originally assumed costume wedding again, but apparently that wasn't to be the case -- just gothic-themed, in nature (a wooded park). The bride and groom would both be dressed in black -- that told me all I really needed to know.

I made sure I cleared by wardrobe (via the wife) with the bride -- black jacket, black pants, my Misfits t-shirt, my new Chuck Taylor-style sneakers with flames on them, and freshly-dyed blue/purple hair. All of that was immediately approved. Daisy ended up wearing a black dress and a dark yellow cardigan with Wednesday Addams-style flat dress shoes and spiderweb fishnets. She also put a lot of purple in her hair (I keep trying to get her to just purple all of her hair, but she adamantly refuses to do so). 

And so, we arrived in Iowa -- a large, sprawling park on top of a mountain (yes, a mountain...in Iowa) with a huge scenic overlook that looked back towards Omaha. It was a near-perfect setting for the wedding. We found that we were two of but eight people there -- the bride and groom, the bride's sister and mother, the officiant, Daisy and the bride's former boss (another mutual close friend of ours)...and us.

It was a sweet little demonic ceremony -- and I do mean that literally -- ghosts, ghouls, creatures, and blood/bodies were all mentioned in the ceremony and the vows, and it was a traditional hand-fasting Celtic/Pagan affair, complete with drinking of port wine and cords and everything one would expect. I filmed the entire ceremony on Daisy's phone, and Daisy had her very nice, expensive camera taking many, many photos of the event -- before, during, and after. Daisy will edit these photos and will provide them to the couple, along with the video, at some later date. 

After the wedding, it was a quick cleanup for the folks there and then we were gone -- nobody would've had any clue whatsoever that a wedding had taken place in said park. It was a really sweet, cute experience. Daisy and I went to Target on the way home to pick up a few necessities, and we were back in our house for the night shortly after it got dark. 

Yesterday -- since I'd taken Halloween off work for the wedding -- I was well-rested and actually awake in the daylight hours on a Friday for once. We'd decided to make it a "date day" because we actually both had time off and were both awake and energetic for once. So, we went thrifting around town and found three beautiful kitchen chairs for our table, for $8 each -- and we then went and had a late lunch at Crystal Jade, our favorite local Chinese place. We ended the day by visiting with the parents for a bit and then picking up cat litter at PetSmart, and I passed out in my chair shortly after it got dark and slept all night long.

I've been knocking stuff off my to-do list as much as possible, one task after another. I can now say that I am completely done with all of the tie-dye for Christmas, and have separated and boxed up all of the shirts I've made for gifting them. Two boxes of them were in fact mailed out to faraway folks yesterday morning, just to get those off the docket too.

However.

I had enough for the parents, Daisy's sister and her husband, and their four boys (plus the two friends I mailed shirts to, mentioned above). I do not have enough for Daisy's other sister, her husband, and their entire family of five kids if they choose to come into town for Christmas or if Daisy wants to send them a box of shirts and have that be their presents this year. To do that, I'd absolutely have to get more shirts and more dyes; I have a few "spare" shirts I made in a few different colors and sizes, but absolutely not enough for a family of seven people. 

I could do it in a weekend and it would be a somewhat inexpensive endeavor to do so, but I need to consult with Daisy and/or the extended family to know if they're going to be in town for or around Christmas (still very much up in the air, even though Mama tells me it's likely not going to happen) and see if Daisy actually wants me to put in the effort of doing that or if she wants to just order and ship them something else. We have 53 days until Christmas as I am writing this, so we have some time, but it's not an incredible amount of time.

Just when I thought I was done, right?

The Rise of Fall, Part III: Northern Turkeys

Of course, with the onset of fall means the holidays are rapidly approaching. But, before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas we here in the states tend to miss one of the biggest holidays of the year for Canadians -- Canadian Thanksgiving.

I've written about it here before; Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated far earlier than the American version of the holiday is. It is always the second Monday in October, and coincides with Columbus Day -- or, as they're rebranding it now, Indigenous Peoples' Day here in the states. It's just as big of a deal in Canada as Thanksgiving in November is down here for the Americans, they just do it a lot earlier. As Daisy's mother is fully Canadian, as Daisy's father is (I believe) 75% Canadian, and as Daisy herself has dual citizenship, we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving here just as much as we celebrate American Thanksgiving. 

This year, Canadian Thanksgiving involved Daisy volunteering to do the vast majority of the cooking of the dinner and us hauling it over to the parents' for a family meal. Neither of the parents have been feeling that great over the past few weeks/months, but it was important to us, as well as them, that we do a Thanksgiving meal. So over the course of a few days, Daisy and I did some food shopping to get the requisite vegetables and other ingredients to create a good dinner -- and through a monumental effort and time, Daisy pulled together corn, green beans, a giant amount of mashed potatoes, a half-gallon of vegan gravy, homemade vegan/gluten-free stuffing, carrots, a vegan turkey (oh, that part was all me, of course) and made a blueberry pie. Mama made cranberry sauce and her famous mustard pickles, as well as a giant basket of dinner rolls (at, ahem, my request).

It was fantastic.

I'd told the team at work I would be in late that night, because it was a Monday -- not one of my normal days off -- and even though I start at 10pm, I knew there was no way that eating a mountain of food like that wouldn't put me into a coma for at least a little bit afterwards. 

We did dinner around 5, and were home by around 8-ish. True to form, I quickly passed out for about two and a half hours in my chair upstairs once we got home, as I knew I would. By around 11:30 or so I was awake and conscious enough to process rational thought again, and started work shortly before 12.

There's still some Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge even now. I finished the rest of the vegan turkey and what was left of the half gallon of gravy last night, but I know there are a few of the rolls left and there are probably some vegetables or leftover stuffing in there too. It was a very large amount of food. The picture of the plate above does not do it justice. The above picture is about 3x what I would eat in any normal sitting for a meal. Okay, maybe not 3x, but at least double. 2.5x; we'll settle on that. 

This same process will likely repeat itself in a little over another month, of course, when we celebrate American Thanksgiving -- though it's likely that unless we have family in town again we'll be doing some other sort of meal. Daisy is always fond of suggesting off the wall things like "let's just do tacos" or something like that when it comes to holiday dinners, because it's far easier overall to make and clean up, and it's not like it's questionably less satisfying or anything like that. 

We honestly don't know what plans are yet for the holidays. I've already taken off the night before Thanksgiving as well as the following Sunday, to stretch it all into a five-day weekend for me -- the final bit of downtime before the headlong rush into the big holidays of Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day. I have only planned as far ahead as taking those days off around Thanksgiving -- I have no idea what I'll be doing around my birthday and Christmas this year or how much PTO I'll have around those times to cover the time I would ideally want to take off. My birthday is on a Friday, which would normally be good (I don't work Fridays) but to actually enjoy it and not sleep through it, I need to take the night off beforehand. Christmas is on a Wednesday. I absolutely don't want to come back to work on the day after Christmas, a Thursday, but similarly I don't want to have to work the days between my birthday and Christmas either as those days are generally used to prep for the holiday itself -- wrapping presents, making sure the last of the cards are sent out, making and executing various Christmas plans, etc. Adding to this, after my lengthy trip to Canada earlier this year as well as my trip to visit my parents in NC, my PTO is running slim right now and I don't know how much of it I'll have to spare before the holidays roll around. It does help that November has three pay periods and there are five more total before the end of the year, through which I'll accrue approximately 32 more hours of PTO to use (translation: four days) but needless to say, there's going to be some planning involved to make the most of the time given the need for time off for me. 

Halloween, at least, is set. Well, sort of.

I took Halloween off because we're attending our friend's wedding, even if I'm not officiating it. 

Mind you, I don't usually do weddings. I don't really like going to weddings or funerals -- neither has ever been my thing. I only attend weddings of those who are either very important to me, or conversely, if it's very important to Daisy that I attend with her. We're not really people who are into social gatherings anymore of any sort, really -- we tend to stay at home with our cats and streaming services and work ourselves into nice little ruts on the couch in our respective spots -- but occasionally it's important enough that we attend an event that we do it. 

In this case, we've both known this friend for over a decade -- she worked with both Daisy and myself at what is Daisy's former job as well as me at my own current job -- and over that time we've become somewhat close with her. Not like, invite-her-to-the-house close, but close enough to consider her a friend, and we are picky about our friends these days. 

I should add here as an aside that I'm okay with weddings that are fun, and have attended a few of those over the years. Daisy's best friend (the one whose Halloween party we went to last week) had a destination wedding five years ago in one of the most beautiful resorts I've ever been to in Colorado Springs, and that was a blast. Another of Daisy's friends had a Harry Potter-themed wedding a couple of years ago as well, and that was just as fun to attend. Now, the Halloween wedding isn't exactly Halloween-themed, per se, but it is a very small gathering and it's somewhat informal. There's not a big bridal shower or giant reception afterwards or anything like that -- it's a small wedding involving proabably ten or fifteen people at most in a park on Halloween. The bride is wearing a black dress. I'm wearing a Misfits t-shirt and have a head of freshly-dyed blue hair to go along with my Chuck Taylor-style sneakers with flames on them. Etc. I consider that sort of wedding fun. Because, having been married for well over a decade at this point, I also know it's not the wedding ceremony itself, but the overall following marriage that counts. A ceremony is a ceremony -- it can be as lax or as formal as one wants, but in the end it's just one day when the rest of the marriage in the future, after that day, is what actually matters. And for the record, I think the future for the couple in question will be perfectly fine.

Daisy did re-dye my hair the blue velvet this weekend -- the color that was supposed to be more violet than blue. 

That...is not how it turned out.

I used some color-stripping stuff in my hair beforehand to try to get out the rest of the blue I'd had in there from the summer. It did not work that well. It pulled some of it out, yes, but not even the vast majority of it. I figured okay, fine, the new color is dark enough to where it won't matter. And for the most part, I was correct...however the more-violet-than-blue was not the case.

"This looks really blue," Daisy said as she began applying it to my head. "Is it supposed to be this blue?"

"It's supposed to be the color on the box," I said. 

 Now, that picture makes it look very blue, but I promise I got the "blue violet" one circled in the photo and the box is decidedly more violet than the one in the picture.

Well...

On the plus side, I now have something close to the original blue color I wanted in July when I dyed my hair the first time, but there's a bit of false advertising in the violet part of it.

Oh well. It is what it is. It's just hair, and the finished result looks fine. I'm sure I'll fade out in the coming months and I'll be able to re-blue it a few times with the remainder of that tube as well as the blue-depositing leave-in conditioner I have. Plus, I have another jar of the dark smoky blue from another company coming to me in the mail this week, a full bottle of "Purple AF" from yet another company, and I also have an unopened bottle of purple-depositing leave-in conditioner too, so I don't expect to have hair of any normal color anytime soon. As my hair gets longer over the winter, it's going to be interesting to see what it looks like. 

Anyway.

I have no plans for my birthday this year. I alluded to this a bit above but I really have nothing I'd like to do or really accomplish. I've found when we make plans in advance for my birthday, I either don't have the energy to accomplish them or I find that I really don't want to do them by the time my birthday actually rolls around. 

I thought about setting up an appointment with the artist I really like at my local shop (the one who did the blue jay on my arm) to see if she could do a black cat tattoo -- since I, yeah, own two black cats and they're both very important to me -- but that's going to come down to budget and whether I really want to do that. Since I got the blue jay about 16 months ago, I've had my tattoo needs sated for the time being and I haven't had the real need or desire to get another one. Perhaps that will change, perhaps it won't; my mind can sometimes be as fickle as the breeze.

And, honestly, it's hard for me to think too far ahead. Most of my day to day life just consists of work and sleep and keeping the cats and the wife as happy as possible, and sometimes (read: frequently) that saps all of my energy and spirit right out of my body.

The cats are fine, by the way. Empress celebrates her first birthday in about two weeks, and I got a little pink party hat/bow tie/bandana to put on her for pictures. She has, in her first year, become a massive beast of a cat -- while she is not the heaviest (Hank is still the heaviest) she is very likely the largest, and seems like she's still growing. As she grows in size, so does her love for us as her parents. She will spend hours playing fetch with me or Daisy, she now accepts most love and cuddles, and she has taken to sleeping with me on my legs in bed. She is a very sweet, smart girl.

Mable, however...

Mable -- who has more Maine Coon DNA in her than Empress, even -- has now grown to be almost Pete's size (though she is far lighter in weight) and her coat has begun to fill out and get thicker, longer, and shinier. She is definitely still growing and I expect her to end up probably close to Emmy's size -- it's just genetics, really. She is still a little goblin, though not as much anymore as she was several months ago. She loves to be held and made over, and she was perfectly content to be zipped inside my hoodie with me or to lounge inside my bathrobe while I'm working, for long stretches of time. However, she's not all the way there yet when it comes to play and human contact. Sometimes she still bites our toes, sometimes she still jumps on stuff, climbs on things, knocks things over, and is...well, a goblin. But she's growing quickly and maturing quickly. She loves to cuddle up with Pete (and sometimes Sadie) on the couch, but she tends to spend time with everyone fairly equally. She loves laying down on Daisy's chest, and she loves laying at my feet or against my legs -- or, sometimes, next to me -- as if she's my protector.

Hank is Hank. He's 14 or 15 pounds at this point and is by far the heaviest cat in the house -- He is a very sweet boy and will always run upstairs in the morning when I'm done with work to burst into my room with me and get what I call "dad love time," where he's the only one there and gets to be the 100% center of attention for cuddles and belly rubs. Hank is very vocal and likes to talk to us, and is becoming more cuddly with us as he gets older. He frequently sleeps with both of us, he likes being with us, and he loves cuddling with Emmy. Surprisingly enough, he doesn't really make over Mable as much as we do, or as much as Pete does. Pete loves that little girl so much and she adores him in return. Hank has also had no further health issues whatsoever for about a year now (or close to it) and I don't really expect that to change anytime soon.

The oldies are still old and are still alive. Pete is slowing down a lot in his old age and is beginning to look more haggard, like Maggie did before she passed. He's still the same Pete though, for the most part -- very much the same cat he always was. Sadie is about the same; she is slowing down quite a bit too, and is now basically skin-and-bones -- but she eats like a horse and is still relatively active. As I've mentioned here before though, neither of them likely have that long left. We could have a really shitty set of holidays ahead of us if one or both of them take a quick turn and pass before the end of the year. While I don't necessarily think that'll happen with Pete, Sadie has been really deteriorating since Maggie's death and I think she knows to some extent that she's on borrowed time as is. Sadie is one of those cats who could die tomorrow or could live another two years out of spite for the other cats in the household, so you never know.

Plus, if either of them die, it'll really sort of ruin this year's Christmas card, which memorializes Maggie on the back. 

We've discussed end-of-life plans for both cats, as difficult as it has been. I want Sadie to be cremated and scattered in the park like Maggie was, so that the two sisters can be together again. Daisy wants to cremate Pete as well, but she also wants to keep his ashes to either save or scatter herself somewhere. She wasn't really clear as to why. However, Pete is the oldest and he's been Daisy's baby and her favorite cat ever since we've been together, and I'll respect her wishes and let her do whatever she likes with the old man. 

I've not been in a great headspace as of late when it comes to death; I know it comes for everything and everyone, but as I myself age more it seems so much more close to home, so much more real and concrete than it did when I was younger and more detached from it. Don't get me wrong, when I was younger, I had several friends die, some of them quite close to me. And I was greatly saddened by their deaths because all of them were so sudden --

Two (not one, but two different friends) were murdered by their partners.

Two more died in car crashes.

Two very close friends died of cancer, or of complications from cancer. Both were fairly sudden and I didn't know either one was going to die.

One committed suicide by shotgun.

Another I didn't know that well died of a heart defect in her first year of graduate school.

These were all friends from high school or early college. I'm sure there are others who have died since that time that I don't even know about and would probably be floored or otherwise devastated by. I don't keep up with a lot of people from college or even grad school anymore, and fewer still from my high school days. All of it feels like it was so long ago now that it may as well have been another life. 

And yet, this week, when I saw it was the 19th anniversary of my friend Robbie's death in a car crash, it really affected me. Nineteen years is a very long time. I'm part of his memorial group on Facebook but I couldn't bring myself to say anything. I don't know that there is really anything to say, honestly. It's very hard for me to process grief and death in general.

Of course, all of the above doesn't count all of the numerous friends and work colleagues who have died in the time since. I would need both hands to count all the work people I've known who died -- some of them acquaintances, some of them fairly close at one time or another, and one of them my former manager who taught me a lot of what I know. Well, I mean, a decent chunk of it, anyway. It's a tragedy that you don't know how well liked, loved, and respected you are as a person until you die, and then everyone comes out of the woodwork. 

I've had a thought in my mind for years that I am old enough now to where I'll likely see most, if not all, of my heroes die before I do. The touchpoints for that were always my favorite actors or musicians and for example, I've always used Harrison Ford -- there will be a time, likely soon, where I'll see Han Solo and Indiana Jones dead. And I'll know I'm truly old and/or mortal when that happens. It's just a strange quirk I've always had in my head. I'll likely live to see the remaining Beatles die. I'll likely live to see Bob Dylan die, or Mario Lemieux, or Kevin Smith -- basically anyone I've seen as a cultural touchstone, touch point, for me specifically. It's a strange thought.

I knew, though -- at some point I would be old enough and removed enough from my time as a professor to start seeing my students die. I never really thought about it before, but I knew it was going to be something that came up eventually. And, to be fair, I've had a few of those students die over the years, where I'd read their name in the news and be like "oh yeah, I know that name" and then see the picture and be like "yep, I taught him/her in English 101 in 2010. That's sad." 

It's been very few, thankfully -- less than five -- and it's been very rare. Again, there could be more; I surely do not remember the name of every student I've ever taught; it's been in the high hundreds, possibly close to 1,000 -- and I haven't taught a class in over ten years. 

But the students I was close with, that I developed friendships with either during my class or at the end of the semester when they were no longer my students -- those were actual friends. Those were people I cared about and kept in touch with for years. 

Jordan was one of those students.

Jordan was a very small, mousy little girl in the very first English class I ever taught in 2010. She was quiet and kept to herself and was an excellent writer -- she very much did not need to be in my class; she could have tested out of it and could have never bothered with it. But, she was a transfer student, having moved to Kansas from a little town in Georgia, and needed the credits.

As I recall, anyway.

During her time as my student, she (as did the rest of the class) kept journals that were turned in periodically and were graded as a decent chunk of the grade for the class. Sometimes I'd give prompts in class to write about, sometimes I wouldn't. The students were expected to write in them independently as an ongoing assignment, whether they used it to write creatively, brainstorm ideas for papers, or just scribble out thoughts like a diary -- it was an exercise; the purpose of it was to open the mind to writing, to organize thoughts and to be able to lay them out in a coherent, flowing fashion. 

Half my students either did the bare minimum, well below the bare minimum, or wrote nothing at all/never did the journal part of the class and took the grade hit for it, deeming it a waste of their time (hey kids, I didn't write the curriculum at that point, I just had to follow it). Some others wrote about all the drama with their girlfriends/boyfriends. Some did the prompts and would write pages upon pages of straight up drivel. 

Most of the time I did not read-read the journals -- I would skim them and leave a comment here or there so that the students would know I was paying attention when I was grading them, but on some level it felt like I was invading privacy if I pored over every word, especially with the students who were somewhat candid with their lives and did not care who knew all of their juicy gossip.

I must admit, some of those ones were...interesting.

And then there was Jordan. Jordan, who wrote almost effortlessly, who wrote of her abusive boyfriend/abusive ex, her struggles with her health, about her life in Georgia versus Kansas, and brainstormed ideas for her fantasy novels and short stories she desperately wanted to write. 

I don't know why or how I connected with Jordan as much as I did. She was a kid and I was almost 30 at the time. It wasn't a sexual thing or a power thing (I was in a relationship at the time that -- well, at that time, was still a happy one) and I barely saw myself as a professor as it was the first class I'd ever taught. She was talented, she was smart, she was funny, but she seemed sad and alienated, like she'd been through and had seen a lot of shit in her young years -- I saw a lot of myself in her.

Jordan aced every paper in the class. She missed some time due to her health issues, which I let slide (though the department very much would not have let me had they known). She aced the final too, I believe. She got full credit for her journals. Ironically these are the details I'm somewhat fuzzy on after all these years, because my true friendship with her didn't start until after she had left my class, and it developed gradually. We bonded over nerdy things, we bonded over our cats -- she had a gorgeous black-and-white cat named Molly Boo-Monster, who is still to this day one of the prettiest cats I've ever seen. She told me she wanted to be an English major -- more than that, a Creative Writing major -- because she wanted to write her fantasy stories, her books. She would let me read drafts of her writing, tag me in notes on Facebook that were drafts of her "chapters," etc. Over time, she and I became close. She was a good friend to me and I was to her. I supported her when she left her abusive boyfriend and found a good man, and she supported me through my breakups with the two she-who-shall-not-be-named women before Daisy. She got pregnant, had a really rough pregnancy, and gave birth to a beautiful little girl (who has to be close to ten now, maybe older). When Daisy and I got together and later got married, she was very happy and excited for me.

Over the years though, we slowly grew apart. I saw her around the department a fair amount but those times became less and less as I had to dive into my work to finish grad school on time. The last time I saw her in person was probably 2012 or so -- I needed some furniture and she had two end tables she wanted to get rid of; she gave them to me and I stuffed them in the backseat of my Monte Carlo to take back up to Newton -- and I gave her a giant stack of comics in thanks. Both end tables are currently in storage downstairs in my garage right now as I write this, but I used them for years.

Over the past few years, Jordan's health began to greatly decline. She was very badly diabetic and probably had some other underlying health conditions as well. I know at some point, her kidneys had shut down and she had moved into an assisted living facility (mind you, she was young -- I doubt she was even 30 when this happened, though I could be wrong). Prior to this she and I were in pretty regular contact, sending each other snapchats of the cats and her sending me cute videos of her daughter. When she got really sick, all of this stopped on a dime. Messages went unanswered when I tried to check in with her. 

Periodically -- and I mean by that once every six months or so -- she would post on Facebook to let people know that she was okay, she'd just been really sick but was doing better. She had been so sick for some time that she'd basically gone nonverbal and couldn't speak. Earlier this year she posted that she was finally well enough to leave the assisted living facility and was going home -- much to my happiness.

More than that, though, her mother would periodically post on Facebook health updates about her -- she was doing better, she wasn't doing well, she was in or out of another care facility, etc. 

Until a few weeks ago when she posted and announced that Jordan had died. She was 35 -- a little less than a year younger than Daisy. I had apparently miscalculated her age and she was older than I thought when she was my student. I also found out from her obituary that she had been born in Kansas and most of her family was still there. 

She was laid to rest on October 4th. She had died on September 26th -- almost a month ago now.

Oh yes, she certainly did love all of those things.

I did not find out about her death, of course, until her mother posted about it. I was overcome with grief. I didn't know how to process it; mostly I just stared off into space. Her sweet little daughter will now have to grow up without a mother. I don't know if the girl's father is in the picture or not; he remained mysteriously unmentioned in the obituary. They are no longer a couple on Facebook (well, for obvious reasons now) and he hasn't posted anything publicly since 2022.

I will miss Jordan very much. There's a black hole now in that part of my soul, to see a friend so young and so talented -- and the mother of a sweet little girl -- just gone now. I'll miss our (admittedly infrequent) conversations and Snapchats. I'll miss so many things.

Anyway. Now that I've brought down the room quite a bit, I'll end this here. There's more to come, of course, as we once more begin our descent into the holiday season.

The Rise of Fall, Part II: Weird Science

So, we're back...

Picking up where we last left off, on Saturday we celebrated Mama's (Daisy's mother) birthday. She turned 70 this year -- a monumental birthday for anyone really -- and to celebrate Daisy's oldest sister, husband, and their four boys came into town for a "birthday party" for her.

That is the short short version of the story. 

The much longer/more detailed version is that they were coming into town for but one day -- arriving on Saturday morning and leaving early Sunday morning. Basically, just for the birthday celebration itself, an overnight of sleeping fast, and then back on the road back home. This wouldn't be a huge deal if they lived an hour away, or a few towns away, but they live in Denver. It's a ten-hour drive, roughly, one-way -- a twenty-hour round trip hauling four boys here and back across Nebraska. Ten hours may not seem like a lot, but I promise you that drive is very long and very boring for the vast majority of it. 

Daisy said that it was important to her that we maximized the time they would be in town to spend the vast majority of it with the family, and I agreed. She'd made big plans on Friday for us to get several things accomplished, including going to pick up food for dinner (her sister was bringing the dessert) and getting Mama's gifts ready. Friday was my day off, so I planned to go do the shopping with her and to help her in her other endeavors as I could.

And then, Friday afternoon, I got a call from my executive director -- asking essentially what he would need to do for me in return to get me to work that evening and cover as director again. My direct boss would still be out of town until Monday and the weekend director took the weekend off for a family event, and her backup was unreachable/otherwise unavailable. In a situation like that, leadership's hands are tied and they have to start calling people in or otherwise we have no management coverage for what is generally one of the busiest times of the week for us -- Friday night. 

I agreed to do it, primarily because it is very difficult for me to say no to my big boss, but also because I have a sense of honor, duty, and a work ethic and don't want the team to be thrown to the wolves when I do have the ability and capacity to help. So, I got some caffeine in me and logged in, and worked until three in the morning -- until everything was in a good enough place to where I could step down from the proverbial podium and slip into the shadows for the remainder of the night.

However, this meant that I got very little rest before Mama's birthday party. I passed out in my chair sometime around 4 and woke up around 9, groggy and disoriented with a crick in my neck. Daisy had already gotten up by that point and was running around getting things ready, getting dressed, etc. We'd eschewed going grocery shopping for dinner and instead Mama wanted us all -- the full family -- to go to El Basha (our town's best mediterranean restaurant) for lunch. I knew from it being one of the places we frequently get food from that they don't even open until 11am, so I had some time to wake up and try to force myself to be a person again, to get a shower and put on nice clothes to appear to be somewhat human, etc., before I'd be around the family all day.

Daisy let me know she was going over there early, around 10 or so -- her sister and the kids hadn't arrived yet, and wanted to know if I wanted to go over early. I looked at her like a bear who had just been awakened from hibernation and told her no, I wasn't a person yet. She said she'd swing back to pick me up before lunch, and off she went. 

The rest of the day was spent doing that lunch, having cheesecake much later for a dessert, and spending time with Daisy's sister, her husband, and their four boys while they were in town. Mama had a good birthday, filled with love and family and surprise presents. The weather was gorgeous -- it's been very unseasonably warm here in Omaha for October and we've been breaking temperature records left and right -- and when we left to come home, even though it was late and well after dark, it still had to be in the 70s.

The family was set to leave town the next morning around 11. We told them we'd be back over to see them before they left. We even specifically mentioned that I would be there in the morning too, as I didn't have to work that Sunday night because I'd worked on Friday (normally this is not the case). This was the plan, and they'd acknowledged it -- they knew we were coming back to see them off.

Daisy and I slept in the overnight and got up early -- we were in the car and over there by the 10am hour...only to find that they'd left forty minutes beforehand. No calls, no texts, no Facebook messages to tell us that they were leaving, nothing. They'd been rushing to get out the door since 6-something that morning, and apparently us coming back was an afterthought.

How nice.

We'll likely see them again for Thanksgiving (the American one) and we'll definitely see them for Christmas, as it's their year to be in Omaha for it -- which is part of why I've been making so many tie-dye shirts.

About those -- I have now passed probably 40-50 shirts created over the course of the past month or so. In all sizes, too. Their four boys range from ages 5 to 16 and their sizes vary wildly across the board. Our brother-in-law is close to a foot taller than me and is built like me (read: large), and Daisy's sister is much shorter and is beanpole thin. Add to that the shirts I'm making for the parents and it is quite a lot. 

Daisy has questioned this hobby/holiday project, saying that it's expensive and/or too large in scope, or that it's becoming a compulsive obsession (pick one). I'm just trying to give the kids and parents a good Christmas. If we have the rest of Daisy's family come in (her other sister, husband, and their five kids) for Christmas, I'll have more than enough shirts for all of them too. If not, everyone gets a lot of shirts.

I project that by Halloween or so I'll be completely done, and can divide them up, box them, and gift-wrap them. I will need to get some mailer boxes and/or envelopes to ship out the ones I'm sending to other friends and family. 

It is a labor of love, of course. More than anything else it just takes time. I can dye a shirt in five minutes, but the 8-12, sometimes up to 24-hour dye "set" time is what makes it take so long. There is a sort of weird science to it; sometimes I think my color combinations are going to be awful and they come out great, and other times I think they're going to be beautiful and turn out to be absolutely dogshit. I have some "color remover" packets to use in case of emergency, like if a set of shirts get browned out really badly or something like that, but so far (luckily) I have not had to use them. Even the more iffy shirts tend to have some sort of morbid beauty to them. The beautiful ones, of course, are beautiful regardless.

The worst (and really, the only bad) part of this work is that I don't know if it is actually rewarding work -- I won't know until people open up their boxes on Christmas morning, or open up their packages sent to them in the mail. I told Daisy that once the shirts are gifted, they're out of my hands -- if people like and love them and wear them that's great; if they don't and they immediately get chucked into the Goodwill giveaway bag, that's on the giftee, not the gifter. What is that thing they always say? It's the thought that counts? Yeah. That. We'll go with that. 

In other news, to wrap up this entry, tonight we attended a Halloween costume party hosted by one of our closest friends.

Now, mind you, I'm not a huge party/gathering person -- I am even less of one now that we seem to finally, after four years, be fully coming out of a mass pandemic. In that time I more or less became feral and mostly regressed in my social intelligence to not knowing how to handle groups of people anymore. I went from being someone with a rather quiet, but still active social life to the hermit who never leaves the house unless he has to. And honestly, I rather like the latter version of myself -- it's more me than I've been in many years -- since before Daisy when I was living alone. 

Because I've gotten so into that groove (or rut, more appropriately), I haven't left it much.

But Brandon, you might be saying, didn't you spend two weeks surrounded by family in Canada this summer, and another week with your parents this fall?

I did, but those are special circumstances. I don't really count vacations.

Anyway.

When our friend bought a new home late this past summer, one of the things she wanted to do was throw a Halloween party this fall. It wasn't necessarily a housewarming party, per se, but part of it was indeed to show off the new house -- which is gorgeous, by the way -- and to see those of us she was close to for an evening of Halloween-themed food and costumes. I adore this friend; she's likely Daisy's best friend ever and was the Maid of Honor in our wedding -- I know her quite well. Over the years she has been a close ally and strong advocate for not just Daisy, but for me and for us as well. Her teenage daughter is a great kid and we go to all of her school plays. Her husband has always been wonderfully sweet to both Daisy and I. They are likely the closest friends we have in town. So, when she mentioned that she'd be doing the party, I was excited to go. 

It's been some time since I've actually dressed up for Halloween in any sort of recognizable fashion; back when I worked in the office and not at home, we used to organize Halloween events and everyone working on Halloween night -- which, for 3rd shift, was anywhere between seven and ten people, generally -- came in costume, we brought food for Halloween potluck dinners, employees would bring in their kids and they'd trick or treat in the office, etc. It was fun. One of our team leads is big into the "haunt" scene -- as in, he's one of the guys who designs and works crew for haunted houses and other scare-based attractions, goes to conventions for it, etc -- and he used to bring his whole family to site, all of them in costume. It was pretty fun. Over the years we were in the office, I wore various costumes -- one year I was Cyclops of the X-Men, one year I was Mega Man, one year I was Captain America, one year I was a Team Rocket grunt, etc. You get the picture. One year I just wore my bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers because fuck it. Point is, it was a fun experience.

Until we all got off work at 7am on November 1st, when everyone is no longer in the Halloween spirit and they're all coming to work to start their shifts at the time we're getting off and going home -- people who seemed somehow shocked that the overnight crew would be in costume, because who are the overnight crew going to see, and Halloween is over now right? 

Yeah, there always has been a huge chasm of personalities between the types of people who work the overnight and the types of people who work dayshift.

Now, working from home, I haven't dressed up in years. I don't think Daisy and I have even done a Halloween "party" since before we bought the house. The only ready-to-go costume I have on hand is my full-spandex Superman suit, and I will not leave the house in that as that spandex is really thin and it zips up the back -- I cannot use the bathroom, at all, in any way, without taking it almost entirely off. So when I have worn it, it has been for exceedingly short durations of an hour or two at most. And that was several years ago -- I have no idea if it even still fits the same anymore. My weight and body has fluctuated quite a bit in that time. 

Daisy went shopping for Mama's birthday and for our friend's upcoming Halloween wedding about two weeks ago and found two very fuzzy, brown robes at Forever 21 on deep clearance -- she got one for each of us. Her thought was maybe we could get some bear ears and possibly bear noses off Amazon and go as teddy bears for our friend's party -- a couple's costume. I said sure, I was on board for that; the pictures would be hilarious and cute at the very least. 

As the days went on, I told her I needed an answer on if that was what she wanted to do or if she wanted to split off and have us do individual costumes, because likely whatever we needed to get would come from Amazon and I'd need to order it in order to get it here before the party. She flip-flopped on it several times, she did not know what she wanted to do. I offered her another option -- I had black slacks and a Star Trek uniform shirt already (I'd ordered the shirt for funsies many months ago) and if she didn't want to do the teddy bear thing, I was more than happy to just go on Amazon and order the phaser I'd had on my wish list for years to complete the costume. It would be quick and simple for me. Bonus: I could go use the bathroom as necessary in the Star Trek uniform. 

She eventually decided that the robes would likely be too hot to spend a few hours in at a party and told me to go order the phaser, which I did -- she'd find something else to wear. She had some ideas milling around in her head. 

One day while I was asleep last week, she went to the local Goodwill looking for costume ideas. She returned home with a queen-size, olive-drab-green jersey bedsheet -- appeared to be new and unused or very lightly used at best -- a rainbow scarf, and a vampire cape. She said she was going to take the sheet over to the parents' and turn it into a dress that she could both wear on the daily as well as wear as part of a "forest goddess" costume for the party. The cape and the scarf were just bonuses that she may or may not wear for the party. Sounded fun to me.

What followed was two straight days of her bent over her sewing machine at the parents' house, working with Mama to turn a big green bedsheet into a dress. Now, as you know, Daisy is not a small woman. She's big and thick and I love her for it (if she wasn't I'd likely snap her in half like a twig, because I myself am not small). Dresses for big women are different than those for smaller ones. They have to fall on and fit the body comfortably, naturally, but also in a way that is stylish. When making a dress all of this has to be taken into account even more. When making a dress from a bedsheet with no real start-end points in mind and only mental patterns (and I am sure some physical ones/ rough plans) to go off of, it's a lot harder than it sounds. 

Daisy worked on this dress for two solid days -- all day yesterday and all day today before the party. Throughout the whole process I tried to be as helpful and supportive as possible, though the process itself was frustrating her immensely. Last night she came home and was feeling ill, and said she'd just go back over in the morning and finish it. When she did that this morning, very early, she spent the entire day finishing it up before declaring it "good enough" for the party, and once I was in my Starfleet uniform, we were off.

The "party" itself was very small; it was our friend, her husband, her mother, her daughter and her boyfriend, some cousins up visiting from Missouri with their own kids, and us. It was a fun, intimate experience -- especially as we (and I guess her daughter's boyfriend) were the only people there who weren't actual family...but she considers us family. They put out a massive spread of food, making sure that most of it was vegan/vegetarian and/or gluten free, to try to cater to both Daisy's and my own dietary needs. There was a lot of it that was not, of course, but she made sure to point out those things. I was very impressed.

We stayed for probably 2 hours, maybe a little longer. Her husband even put the WVU vs. Iowa State game on the TV for me because I was missing it by being at the party. Our costumes went over exceedingly well, and I even got to use the line "yes, that IS a phaser in my pocket, but I am also happy to see you." 

Her costume, by the way? She was a Cybertruck. She'd built a suit for it out of cardboard boxes. Her husband was a vampire, complete with amulet, collared cape, and fangs. Her daughter and boyfriend were Morticia and Gomez Addams. Daisy, of course, was a forest goddess in her new dress, with some decorative flowers attached -- in beautiful makeup, and with a flower crown. 

It was a fun experience. There were many pictures taken. If you're on my Facebook, the two of us in costume is now my current profile picture. T'is the season, after all. 

We came home, and Daisy -- who was now completely burnt out -- showered and had some vegan pizza, and I watched the remainder of the WVU game before setting another few shirts on to dye and passing out for a short, hour-or-so nap. When I awoke, she was already in bed and had been for some time. 

So, that's all for now. But, believe me, there is much more coming.