Updates

Spring semester: day seventy-one

It is 63 degrees outside, and breezy, at 4:47 AM. I have just awakened and have come upstairs after going to bed around 8:30 PM or so. It is supposed to be near 85 today (it hit 84 yesterday), and I plan to wear shorts, sandals, my aviators, and one of my new Hawaiian shirts to teach in this morning (well, I won't wear my aviators while teaching, but you get the idea). This is what I've been waiting not-so-patiently for all semester -- temperatures and weather conditions warm enough to enjoy being out in, temperatures and weather conditions that Kansas usually enjoys six or seven weeks before now.

And then I wake up to see this:

Yes, you're reading that correctly -- that says tomorrow the temperature is supposed to plummet by 23 degrees, and then another 19 on Thursday, and on Thursday, snow. SNOW. In May. MAY!

I am so completely done with this shit. My allergies are killing me this spring, and it's because of shit like this, where it's in the 80s one day and two days later it barely reaches 40 and snows. My lungs and sinuses can't adjust to one weather pattern before another, completely different one ripped from the months of winter replaces it. It's going to be fucking May and snowing.

I have lived in four states scattered around the country and never has it snowed in May in any of them in my lifetime.

I don't know what to make of this. I am so battered down and depressed by the weather systems that I actually want to cry in frustration on a certain level. How long can this bullshit possibly last? I mean, really. We've not really had a spring -- we've had maybe five days of spring interspersed with ice storms and snowfall. Is this going to continue into summer? Are we going to get snow in June, too? The last two days in my house, I've spent wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and flip-flops because it's been so warm. Now all of a sudden I'll have to dress in layers again, and turn on the furnace/electric blanket again in May? I don't know how to otherwise express this to you folks that I have never seen weather patterns like this before, and I turn 31 this year.

Anyway. Rant over.

I slept all night for once because I got up last night around 1AM, and stayed up until the aforementioned time of 8:30 PM. This was not necessarily by choice; I only wanted to stay up until around 5PM or so, so that I could get up around 2 or 3 and be wired for the day. However, in killing time yesterday afternoon while Daisy got an oil change in her car and I was taking care of student stuff (emails continue to roll in, all of them asking questions about how to format/organize/cite things for their final papers, due a week from today), I decided to do some computer surgery and install the new RAM in my old Dell laptop I'd brought back home from school, as that would only take a few minutes.

Well, yes, that only took a few minutes -- unscrew the back panel, take out the old RAM modules, and snap the new ones into place before replacing the panel -- the computer itself had not been powered on for close to six months, and with Linux systems (as that one is) six months is a long time to go without system updates and upgrades. The Dell was already at least two, if not three, OS upgrades behind because its low memory (it had, before I put 2GB in it, 512MB) wouldn't allow it to run a faster or more upgraded OS. The computer's from 2005 and was worked hard before my friend Lacey gave it to me three years ago before I started grad school -- I replaced the keyboard and hard drive then, so it was only a matter of time before I swapped out the RAM. I also know that the 2GB I put in it is basically the bare minimum to run any recent OS well; the Toshiba that Daisy got me for Christmas only has 2GB in it, and it's slower than piss running Ubuntu 12.10. 13 is out now, but until I get more memory in that machine, I can't upgrade it and expect any true functionality. I run 12.10 on this desktop machine that I'm typing this post on and it runs really, really well, but it also has 4GB RAM (and has had 4GB since I purchased it three years ago).

When I installed the new RAM in the Dell, I booted it and it came on/fired up instantly, still with a completely full battery charge even after being unplugged and in storage for six months. This is a good sign -- it means that the battery in that machine is really good. I took it out to the living room, where it was able to pick up a wireless signal (from someone's unlocked wifi router somewhere in the neighborhood) and I began to upgrade the operating system.

In Ubuntu Linux, you can't just upgrade from whatever you've got to the newest version -- no, you have to install all of the other upgrades one by one. This machine had 11.04 on it, which meant that I had to upgrade first to 11.10 and then to 12.04.2 LTS, which is the latest long-term-stable release supported for three years (hence the 'LTS' in its version title). I wasn't sure that with 2GB RAM the machine could run anything faster than that, as the aforementioned Toshiba is again, slower than piss with 2GB running 12.10, and it has a much newer/faster processor. I can't upgrade the RAM in the Dell any more -- 2GB is its max, since it's so old.

For those of you who don't use Linux and/or have never upgraded a Linux OS, the process is a very long one -- you can either do it via disc or via the web, but the disc upgrade is pretty ponderous as well, and you won't get the latest updates since the disc was burned. The upgrade process usually takes several hours no matter what system you're using. My upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 was fairly short -- a little more than an hour, give or take, but then I made the mistake of deciding then and there to get it running 12.04.2 LTS just so I wouldn't have to upgrade it later.

I started that upgrade around 4PM. It told me "about 7 hours remaining."

Oy.

I set it up, made sure the battery was charged and plugged in, and went to bed. There was no way I could stay up until after 11PM just to let the OS upgrade and continually watch it -- not if I wanted to be able to wake up and go teach this morning. Throughout the overnight hours, during my slumber, it downloaded and installed everything it needed and finished the upgrade, and when I got up around 4 and came back upstairs, all it needed to do was restart in order to completely finish. I let it do that, then went out to get the GNOME shell interface that I'm used to and actually like, before shutting it down. I now have a solid, fast backup computer in that Dell that will do anything I need it to do, including play DVDs and videos without skipping -- which is why I upgraded its RAM in the first place. It's going to become my new bedroom portable DVD/media player, so I can finally watch movies as I fall asleep at night again. I plan to take it downstairs tomorrow, while I'm off, to test that out. Even if it's still sluggish with DVDs (which wouldn't surprise me because the drive itself is old) I have a ton of old anime series on CD-R from my undergraduate days that I've never yet watched, so I could feasibly copy those right to the HD and finally watch them. If I can get that open wireless signal downstairs, as well, I could even watch Youtube or stream movies off Amazon Prime. Additionally, if that Dell does eventually die, I still have the Toshiba I could replace it with.

It is nearing 6AM and is starting to get light outside. I have showered and dressed for the day, and will soon leave the house to get gas before I drive to campus. The car seems to be acting fine again; it hasn't flashed the "Service Engine Soon" light at me since that one time last week, though I do know that I'll have to do a little preventative maintenance on it myself pretty soon -- including adding more coolant (which, for some reason, it also tends to burn off) and oil, and if the last of my bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil is in the car already, I plan to drain that into the gas tank this morning when I fill up to keep her running correctly. I'm pretty sure my car has hot/cold weather allergies as well -- she doesn't like the rapidly fluctuating temperatures any more than I do, and responds by burning more or less oil/coolant off over time depending on the conditions, being a little sluggish from time to time, and basically whining at me. Sorry, baby, I can't control the weather.

This is, technically, the very last week that I have left to teach; one week from today, my Engineering English 102 class ends, and I will collect their final papers. This week is workshop week for my students, where the drafts of those papers will be peer-reviewed in class. This is also the last week where I'm holding formal office hours (read: today) and will be working in the Writing Center -- next week, if I'm needed, I may work my hour in there, but if they're relatively or completely dead, I'm just going home. My students all know this because I have made it clear to them. I'll probably get home a little before 5PM today, give or take an hour.

This weekend, on Saturday, is the Newton City-wide Garage Sale. I look forward to this weekend all year long leading up to it, as everyone has a garage/yard sale at the same time, starting at (usually) 7AM. Last year I couldn't do it due to circumstances out of my control, and the year before me, my ex, and Rae & Jay came up for it, and we raided this town for hours all day long. I've been trying to get a group of us together for this year's event, making my house a "home base" of sorts, but the difficulty in doing so is that most of us are trying to get rid of what we already have so that there's less to move to a new destination after graduation, and the majority of us don't have a vehicle large enough to carpool around town in. My Monte Carlo is a landboat, but its trunk is small, its backseat has never been cleaned since I purchased the vehicle (and thus is a dirty, dusty graveyard for bees, flies, and wasps), and driving it around town stopping every block or two would not only be incredibly bad for its already-overtaxed engine, but would overheat its naturally-aspirated engine quickly -- trust me, I know this; as soon as I get off the interstate and drive a more reasonable speed of 35 between the exit and my house (about four miles), stopping at stoplights and the like, the temperature gauge slowly moves from left to right, heating up because it's not getting the fast, cool airflow from the highway anymore. Stopping and starting that car over and over and over, all over town, may kill it. And obviously, I can't do that. Only a few of us have SUVs big enough for a group of us to fit in along with anything we purchase, and I've not-so-subtly been trying to recruit them for a day of fun and running around town.

On that note, it's time for me to grab my bag and go. It's a beautiful morning and wonderful driving weather -- I can't wait to hit the interstate with my window down and the stereo cranked.

Serene Grace

It is 7:40 AM on a Sunday. After writing my last post, I needed some fresh air to clear my head and center myself, so I stepped outside onto my balcony. In the yard below me and to my right, maybe thirty feet away, stood three of the large, wild turkeys which wander the neighborhood in the early mornings and eat from my neighbor's birdfeeder.

It was a very serene scene -- nothing but the turkeys, the chirping of birds, and the cool spring air. The turkeys are used to seeing/hearing people in the neighborhood; they're not scared, and won't run off unless you approach them or get within a few feet of them.

This is life in Newton, Kansas. Quiet, peaceful, almost a zen-like calm. I'm going to miss this town, at least a bit, when I eventually leave it. I've spent some pretty formative years of my life here -- the past four years have been really formative for me, actually. I think I've "grown up" more in these past four years living in this house, in this town, than I have throughout my entire life leading up to them, and occasionally I have to take stock of things. This is one of those mornings where I'm grateful for my life, despite all of its faults (and my own faults).

I have a house. It's not a perfect house, and it needs a good cleaning and some occasional TLC, but it's my own as long as I can pay for it. I have a car that, while she may be less than perfect herself, gets me where I need to go when I need to go there. I have three beautiful, sweetheart cats who will always love me no matter what, and who have gotten me through some really, really rough times -- not to mention have also kept me warm on the many freezing nights where I didn't want to run the furnace for eight hours straight.

I have my wonderful, beautiful fiancee, Daisy, who loves me unconditionally even with all of my faults, occasional depressions and/or issues, and despite the fact that I smoke like a chimney and drink more coffee than should humanly be possible. She is the light of my life and the reason I keep getting up every morning (or evening) to go about it. Yes, Daisy and I are both pretty solitary, private people who want to be left alone for the most part -- but that works for us, and both of us realize how lucky we are not only in finding each other, but in our everyday lives and day-to-day routines.

I have my health. No, I'm not perfect; I've got shitty circulation, terrible allergies, and varicose/spider veins in my ankles, but I'm free of disease, I'm in okay shape (not good, but certainly not terrible) and -- as far as I know -- I don't have cancer. I've lost a lot of weight in the past several years, I have gorgeous hair, and I can grow an incredibly manly beard. That's more than enough for me.

I have food in the house and plenty of money in my bank account, and with that comes the ability to pay my bills, put gas in the car, and -- if I choose to -- go out and get something different to eat if I so desire, or go buy a new shirt and pair of pants, or to get the Blu-ray of a movie I want to see...or to actually go see a movie in the theater. These may seem like little things or minor comforts, but believe me, they matter. They matter a lot. The ability to say "You know, I think I'll order a pizza" or "You know, I should go check out that store on the north end of town that I've been meaning to shop at" is liberating in a way that I can't even describe. It makes me feel like a normal person -- it makes me feel human. To be able to have a bit of freedom in choosing what I want to do, when I want to do it, and being able to afford to do it without having to worry about the consequences is something most people take for granted, and something that I gained a newfound appreciation for last summer when I was broke and basically confined to my house, scraping by on pennies and selling all of my video games and my guitar and amp to survive through a few months' worth of food and bills.

But, more than that, I have people in my life who care about me -- not just Daisy, but my parents, my friends and family, and Daisy's family -- and many people don't have even that much. Despite all of my bitching about life and my deeply introspective, depressing-sounding posts here, I am relatively happy and I am optimistic about the future. These things seem to get lost in translation, or buried under all sorts of stresses or worries, or problems going on in the background (or foreground, at times) that I have no control over and just need to let go. It's so easy to forget about that and let thankfulness fall to the wayside.

Just a few minutes standing on my balcony was all I needed. I was put at ease, at least for that short time, yet nothing had changed -- I still had all of my worries, all of my thoughts and troubles and responsibilities ahead of me, but in that moment, none of them mattered. It was just me, the chirping birds and the turkeys eyeing me, and the fresh morning air. When I came back inside, my cats were waiting for me, wide-eyed with love and wonder as to why I'd gone outside, and I bent down to comfort them to let them know I wasn't going anywhere.

I still have student papers to look through. I still have laundry to fold and put away, a kitchen to clean, and a dishwasher to run. I still have a shopping list to make, fifteen graduation announcements (as well as an electric bill) to mail, and a house to vacuum. I still have garbage that must be wheeled to the curb and a cat litter box to be sifted through and refreshed. I still have two weeks of actual class left, then a finals week before graduation. My car will need an oil change and two front tires soon, if not other repairs. There are things to do and things to worry about, many of which are not mentioned on this list. But everything comes, and happens, in its own time.

I went back to my desk, where my cat Sadie laid down on my feet, and dispensed a cup of coffee from my coffeemaker. I lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke straight up into the air above my head to watch it slowly dissipate from a grey cloud to a discoloration of the air to nothing. And then I started to write this post.

Turning Off

When I say that I have "a large amount of relative free time," it usually comes with a caveat, and that caveat generally circles around the word relative. I can never tell you folks fully how much is going on behind the scenes in my life (or in the lives of those I'm close with) because I tend to have, and deal with, a lot of very private matters -- it is not always school or work that stresses me out, but stuff going on behind the scenes as well, none of which I can, or should, write about here. This is why, in order to keep writing here and actually be able to somewhat de-stress myself, I write four-part blog posts about unclogging my pipes.

Yes, in case you forgot, that happened.

Regardless, in addition to everything else that goes on in my daily life, things which I do write about here, there's just as much that I absolutely cannot write about in such a public space. Some of it is deeply personal, either with me or with others, some of it is work-related, etc. It still can't be brought up here, and it all stresses me and adds to my anxiety levels -- that added to everything else that I tell you here already. I basically have to "turn off" what I can, and focus on the stuff I have to focus on in order to get through my daily tasks and daily life. This is one of the big reasons that my phone has been turned off for months, and why I so rarely check anything but my school email anymore; when I do check my personal accounts, I find messages from friends both current and former that I have no desire or care to reply to, and I won't. This is why I've fallen out of contact with many friends and former friends. I just don't have the time or patience to deal with all sorts of little trivial things or first-world problems in the lives of others when I have many, many more important things to deal with every single day which affect me personally and affect my career personally. To some people, this may sound self-centered or supremely standoffish/narcissistic -- to those people I also say that if you knew everything that was going on in my life behind the simple window I display here on this blog, and/or had to deal with these things yourself, you'd likely be the same way. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just want to be left alone.

No, I don't have cancer; no, nobody's dead or dying; and yes, for the moment I am perfectly financially stable and will graduate in three weeks just fine.

That being said, this is yet another reason that, as mentioned last week, I am seriously considering shutting down this blog shortly after graduation. Despite the fact that I do blog, and despite the fact that I write a lot about myself and even give a lot of details about my relationship with Daisy, I am for the most part an intensely private person, and so is she. There's nothing wrong with our relationship, mind you -- in fact, it couldn't be better -- and none of the stuff I can't write about has to do with her or with us. But, when it comes to the point where there is more I'm not writing about than what I am, there's a problem there. There's a disconnect. I get stifled. I end up writing four-part posts about unclogging pipes, or multiple-part posts about snowstorms. It means I need to turn off and focus on what I need to focus on instead of wasting time here writing about minutiae. I basically have to ignore the fact that both this planet, and most of the people on it, are full of suck, in order to write here at all. And, let me tell you, that's a really hard thing to do. And that's another reason that I've basically withdrawn from most social interaction; I no longer have the time or patience for it. I am most satisfied and at ease with myself and my fiancee, and neither need nor want much else.

Daisy and I share a large number of friends -- I am friends with a few of her close "besties" on Facebook, and I know and get along with her parents quite well. She is also friends with a large number of my friends from her visits down here, as well as friends of mine she's never met in person (yet) but interacts with on almost a daily basis on Facebook -- including my brother, several friends I've kept from high school and college, etc. I don't mind this and have encouraged it on many levels, actually -- a long time ago (and I can't believe I'm actually going to paraphrase this man), Dr. Phil once said that couples, especially married couples, shouldn't and/or plain don't have friends that both of them don't share. While I disagree with this to a small extent, I do agree with it to a much larger one -- and therefore, anyone who is really important to me in my daily life I've made sure Daisy has been made aware of (at the very least), or she has already befriended. I am totally transparent with her, and likewise, she's been the same way with me; she's introduced me to several of her coworkers (via Skype, actually) and I have befriended a few of her close friends -- and both of her sisters -- as well.

I say this because, again, we're private people -- and both of us have the number of friends and/or associates that we need. We're all full up here and all that. We keep our tight little circles and we keep to ourselves, and that's all we want. We're not necessarily self-important people, but we're not exactly social people. Why this is incredibly or necessarily important to the overall discussion is beyond me, really -- it's just on my mind. It does, however, lead to the overall point I've made here a number of times over the past several months -- good lord, world, just leave me/us alone.

Daisy knows and understands that I need a great deal of downtime and alone time; the "alone time" for the past year or so has been spent mainly taking care of student assignments and/or writing and grading papers. Once I graduate, that time will be spent, well, being alone. On purpose. Mostly, it will be spent sleeping and trying to stay as far away from my computer/phone/any semblance of a social life as possible. I actually think this was a big part of why I was always so unhappy when I was single -- I would subconsciously crave attention and interaction with other people because I didn't have anywhere to focus that energy/loneliness. Now that I'm not only taken, but engaged to a wonderful woman, it's like I can say Hooray! Okay, rest of the world -- fuck off. Daisy may be the only other person on the planet who completely understands this mentality in me, and lets me go my own way when I need to do so for a while. She knows that, at times, I need to turn off and disappear for a day or two, or longer, to decompress and take care of responsibilities, and understands this even more now that we work/sleep on opposing schedules most of the time.

It's been a slow process; part of it is done to avoid any sort of unnecessary drama (or entanglements in drama) in and around me, and part of it is done to sort of, well, quietly exit the social scene. Most of the people I know here in Kansas are graduating along with me and are subsequently leaving the state, including a few close friends. By this time next month they'll not only be already gone, but my entire graduate school career will have already come to a close -- an entire three-year situation that will have abruptly ended, and a complete life change for me. The life I've known for years will end at that time, and the next phase of it will begin -- adulthood. True adulthood; marriage-and-job-and-kids-adulthood. And, in that, I have to leave most everything and a fair amount of everyone I knew in the past...well, behind. I have to turn it off. Stresses and problems and issues have to be dealt with in their own time until they no longer exist, and everything else gets turned off and tuned out. I'm already in this process now, as I've mentioned -- there's too much going on around me that I do not want to be involved in, nor do I want to be forced to deal with. I have to take care of me and mine, and swat away the proverbial flies that cause extraneous problems or the aforementioned drama. Mind you, there's a lot that I want to leave behind. I've got enough stress and stuff to take care of in my life as-is; being able to exit quietly from about half of that, or more, will be great. Being able to exit from it and start a new life as a husband and father in the next year or two is even better. I'm trying to rise above everything right now and move on, turning my attention away from anything and everything that would stop me from being able to continue that upward process. Let go of my cape, and all that. The next month or two will be a time of great change, and it's a welcome change for the most part.

They Call It Stormy Friday

Spring semester: day sixty-nine

The remainder of my student conferences went fairly quickly; those students who remained (+/-10 or so) met with me either after class evaluations or in my office shortly afterwards, and I was done by around 1:30 PM. I was home by shortly after 2, made a sandwich because I was starving, sent Daisy a few messages telling her I was home safely and was going to bed, and passed the hell out.

I awoke around 1AM, unable to sleep anymore -- I'd slept almost a full ten hours straight, during which I was able to finally become fully rested. I desperately needed this. However, when I awoke, my allergies were cripplingly awful. As in, could not breathe, blew my nose thirty times, and the sinuses in the back of my head were so congested and full that my neck (even now) is stiff and achy. I took one of my last three Zyrtec Allergy pills, and it's helping, but a huge part of why my allergies are going nuts is because it was 70 yesterday and gorgeous when I came home.

I also found that the other reason my allergies were going nuts when I woke up is because it began storming pretty strongly about an hour after I came back upstairs. My overnight plans were to talk to Daisy while she's at work and to go to Walmart (since I decided against doing it last night when it was really cold and I was tired), and until the storms blow through, the latter half of those plans have been put on hold. I have to get a lot of stuff when I do my shopping, and some of it is heavy and cumbersome (cat food, cat litter, etc). The last thing I want to do is load/unload that stuff in and out of the car in torrential rains, thunder, and lightning. Not to mention that if it starts to hail, I also don't want my car to be in the middle of an unprotected Walmart parking lot. While I no longer really mind night driving (especially when I'm fully awake and alert, and because after a few years of classes that ended at 10PM I got used to it), I don't like driving through torrential rains, even if said drive is only two or three miles. I've got good wipers and headlights, but it just sucks overall. So, until the storms subside, I'm here in my Man Cave writing this blog post.

Yesterday morning, when I started the car, it shuddered for a split second, and then my "Service Engine Soon" light began flashing at me. Fuck.

For those of you who don't know, don't remember when I wrote about it before, or are unfamiliar with mid-1990s Chevrolet models, when my "Service Engine Soon" light is flashing, it means there's an engine misfire in the cylinders. This is generally attributed to one or more spark plugs blowing out. That light is always on, solid, in my car because the car's emissions system needs to be re-tuned (according to the guys who worked on it at the shop last fall), and they told me that's normal for cars of that age and not to worry about it, as it's an expensive and essentially needless repair for a car as old and beat up as my Monte Carlo is at this point. They also said it's not going to damage anything, so again, not to worry about it. However, they did tell me if the light began flashing again, it meant that one or more of my plugs were shot and that I needed to bring it back in immediately.

The car was running normally and strongly, but the light was flashing. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, I thought. You folks know how much I love my car, and how I try to take care of it as well as I possibly can. I just had all the plugs and wires replaced last fall (September, October, something like that) whenever I had them do all of the work on it.

Edit: I just checked; that was September 7th.

Regardless, I shouldn't need new plugs or wires, and the ones I have should be good for years. There's no reason for the engine to have any sort of misfire -- mechanically, though there's 227,000 miles on the car, the engine is in really good shape.

I drove the car slowly to the end of my street, and the light stopped flashing. She wasn't running hot, she wasn't acting weird, and for the rest of the day (both through my drive to campus and my drive back home in the afternoon) the light never flashed again and she ran perfectly fine at normal speeds and temperatures. I chalked it up to old age and it being bitterly cold this morning, and realized that because of the car's age, sometimes things will just sputter a bit before righting themselves. I will still, however, keep a close eye on everything -- at the very least, I need to put at least 250-300 more miles on that car between now and graduation, after which I won't be driving her nearly as much until I get a job somewhere and/or move out of this place. Yes, I did these calculations in my head based on the average amount of driving I do over any given week or two.

On that note, I'm going to take an intermission now and go to Walmart.


~~Intermission~~


Okay.

I went to Walmart at 4:30 in the morning and spent more money than I was expecting to, but I ended up getting a lot of stuff I needed -- including two books of stamps, cat food, litter, motor oil for the car (since she burns off about a quart of oil every month to six weeks), sinus/allergy medicine, cooking oils, and the normal food essentials for around the house.

However, as I was going back to the automotive section to get my motor oil, I had to walk past the plumbing section of the store -- different than the section where you can get Drano and the like -- no, this is the industrial plumbing section, where they sell not only parts for your fixtures, but the super-powerful industrial declogging stuff for drains. I had to stop and look, if only because I wanted to get a few more foamers or decloggers for my drains anyway in case the problem I had persisted.

What I found, and purchased, was interesting -- it's a gallon bottle of "Main Line Cleaner." Pour it all down a drain, wait for some hours for it to do its work (the directions suggest "overnight"), and then flush the line with water for five minutes. Safe for all pipes and plumbing. It's apparently the best stuff one can buy, really -- for ten bucks. There's a reason for that; it's mostly lye, which will dissolve basically anything in a pipe, if not anything period. Gangsters used to use lye to dissolve bodies. And, again, while I don't have any bodies in my pipes, that's good to know. As the clog (if it's still there and problematic) is in my main line somewhere, that stuff should totally flush it out and destroy it.

Mind you, I know how dangerous and/or poisonous lye is. I've put it where the cats can't get to it (even though it's in a thick plastic bottle) and if I do have to use it, I'll be sure to sequester them appropriately. But, this should be the end of my drainage/plumbing troubles one way or another. I don't think there's anything stronger I could get without having to call someone to come look at the pipes physically.

When I left Walmart, I turned the key in my car, and she took about ten seconds or so to start and fire up. Hm. Once she started, I revved the engine a few times and she was fine, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was related somehow to that light flashing yesterday morning. Maybe I've got a plug or two that's about to go out again. Maybe my battery is starting to die. Maybe my alternator is starting to die. Could be anything on a car that old, or could be nothing -- my car doesn't like it when it's all humid and muggy; she runs sluggish when there's a lot of moisture in the air, and it had been storming all night and was quite humid. The light wasn't flashing, she was running fine, and I drove her the three miles back home without incident, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit concerned. Again, I've got at least three more weeks of driving I have to do in that car before I can let her get some "rest," of sorts, for most of the summer. That's one of the reasons I got a few more jugs of motor oil -- I'll put them into her when necessary, and the next time I fill up I'll put the last of my bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil into the tank as well. I tried to get more of that at Walmart, too, but all they had were the $20, 2-gallon jugs of it. I may have to order more of that from Amazon.

I came home, put away the groceries and commodities, and ran a load of laundry. I haven't run any laundry all week, and hadn't run any large amount of water through the pipes since my last shower on Wednesday night. The laundry ran, and drained, perfectly fine on both cycles, with no overflow or backup. Maybe it's a sentient clog, and it's scared of lye. Regardless, it was fine. I'll have to shower sometime tonight, and I have another small load of laundry I need to do within the next few days as well, so I'll be closely monitoring the drain lines anyway. If I have to use the rest of the Max Gel or the Main Line Cleaner, I will.

After that, I wrote out the rent check and mailed it today, and finished addressing/sealing all of the envelopes I have so far for my graduation announcements. There are, currently, sixteen of them. I've got a few more addresses to gather over the next few days, but the first batch of announcements (to family members) is going out tomorrow. The next batch will go out on Monday, another on Tuesday, etc. Daisy asked me why I'm not just sending them out all at once in a big stack in the mailbox.

"Because I have had notoriously shitty luck with the postal service," I said, "and I know that if I mail out a huge stack of them at once, one or more of them will inevitably get lost as they're all going to different places."

"That makes no sense," she replied.

"I know," I said, "but I'm paranoid about that sort of thing."

Some of them will also take longer than others to get to their destinations, as well. I have friends and family scattered around the country. Most of them are in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, yes, but others are going to all sorts of different places. I'm trying to time it so that all of them arrive around roughly the same time. In the meantime I also have bills that will have to be mailed out as well, and I'd rather not mix in bills with a stack of graduation announcements all in uniform envelopes for the same reason that I'm paranoid that those bills will get lost as well. Again, I've had really shitty luck with the postal service over the years. I know it's probably just me being neurotic or overly paranoid, but I'm not taking any chances I don't have to. If I were a less lazy man, I'd drive to the post office and put them one-by-one into the box for out of town mail myself.

Anyway.

I talked to Daisy for a while this morning before she had to go to bed in order to be able to get up and go back to work tonight, and then I myself went back to bed around noon to take a long nap. It's been raining and thundering softly off and on all day, and it's been in the 50s. It feels nice. This is April weather, not snow and ice storms. It's going to be warm (really warm, in the 80s on Monday and Tuesday) for the foreseeable future, so hopefully we're done with the shitty cold rain/ice/snow for the year. I'm hoping it's another mild summer, like it was in 2009-10 or so, when the temperature barely hit 90 most of the time. The past two summers have been brutal and have made my electric bill (from the air conditioner) skyrocket. Oh, how nice it would be to have a $40 electric bill for the months of May and June.

This weekend, since Daisy is working, will be mostly filled with stuff I need to do around the house and for my students. As mentioned before, I have to go through their workshop drafts for next week (I'll probably do that tonight, a bit later) and I desperately need to clean the bathroom and kitchen. I also need to stick the new memory into my old Dell laptop and take it downstairs to make it my new portable DVD player. If nothing else, that's a good little backup machine to have in the house if something happens to this computer. I need to get another RAM upgrade for the Toshiba laptop Daisy got me for Christmas, too, but the sticks for that are so expensive that I have to wait until they get cheaper. To max out the RAM in that old Dell, it was $25. To do it in the Toshiba would cost me about $100, more than a third of what the computer actually cost new. I'll wait on that for a while. The Toshiba is a good machine to be sure, but it's dreadfully slow, even running Linux. The three-year-old Acer desktop I've been using here at home (and which I'm typing this post on) since I've been in grad school is leaps and bounds faster...because it has double the RAM that the Toshiba does.

But, for now, the big things are taken care of -- I got paid today, my graduation announcements are stamped and ready to go in the mail (as an aside, books of stamps are now over nine dollars), the rent has been paid and mailed, groceries have been purchased, and most of my laundry has been done. I can now relax a bit and focus on the stuff that will be more...I don't know, less pressing? Something like that. I actually have time to clean again. I have time to cook again, which is good, as I've made sure that I have stuff in the house to actually cook. I can start looking for jobs in and around the Omaha area, as well as anything here that I could do over the summer if necessary.

Just because I'm not swamped with super-important or pressing work doesn't mean I'm not occupied with other things. For example, Daisy and I created our Wedding Registry this morning on Amazon. We plan to use a few different places, and the first two that came to mind were Amazon and Target -- mainly because not everyone will want to use Amazon, and most people have a Target near them or at least within a half-hour's drive. I'm a huge Target fan; I wish there was one that was much closer to me than Wichita or Hutchinson. Unless Daisy has added more to it over the course of today and tonight, there are only three things on the Amazon registry thus far -- a food steamer, a juicer, and a high-end blender. Can you tell Daisy loves to cook, and to cook as healthily as possible? I can.

"Are you going to put the cotton sheets on it that you wanted?" Daisy asked me.

"Nah, not right now," I said. "I'm not going to mess with it yet. Put whatever you want or think we'll need on it."

The sheets she's referring to are a 100% cotton white sheet set for my king-size bed. Getting sheets that are 100% cotton are nigh-impossible to find under $100-200, especially in King, and I want white ones so that they can be tie-dyed in a multitude of rainbow colors. It would be the biggest project I've ever undertaken, and cotton-poly blends won't hold the dyes I use (because said dyes are inexpensive, and yes, I know this from experience). I could get a set of cotton-poly blend sheets for $30 or less, but if I wanted to dye them, I'd have to spend $100 or more on extremely expensive dye, which sort of negates the point. Even at Walmart, a single 100% cotton pillowcase -- just a pillowcase -- is $22. At this point, I'm not even making dyed shirts or other clothing anymore; I have enough of it already, and the dye kits I liked (Tulip One-Step, RBY 3-pack, $10 or so) are no longer made.

Yeah, so that will likely be a project for long after we're married, when both of us are settled and we have more money and more free time.

On that note, I am going to take care of some of that remaining stuff around the house which needs to be done, including cleaning the toilet and running that second load of laundry.

Unslept and Bloodshot

Spring semester: day sixty-eight

When I finished my previous post I took a sleeping pill, as I mentioned I would, in order to conk out and rest up. I haven't -- as you know if you've been reading this blog for a while -- been sleeping that well as of late. My body wants to sleep at weird times and for lots of short(er) intervals of about six hours or so, and even on my lighter work schedule that plays hell with the stuff I need to do during any given week. If I only sleep for six hours before a long day of work (such as this week, during student conferences) my brain and body will be shot by the time I get home and can actually go to bed again. When I do, I tend to crash out and will sleep for eight or nine hours before, once more, waking up groggy and needing a two-hour routine to fully awaken and become focused on anything, and I'm almost constantly fatigued even when I'm awake. At this point of the semester, there's no real resetting of my circadian rhythms that can take place; I just need to sleep when I can, and when I can't, I need to do what I need to do. Until I come home from Daisy's parents' after graduation weekend, I'm not going to be able to reset everything, nor will I be able to completely unhinge (in a good way, mind you) to relax. That's almost a full month away, and I can't even look that far ahead yet. I'm also bound to get some decent sleep/rest in that time as well, though I doubt I'll be able to switch around my sleeping patterns that much.

Anyway, I'm getting off track.

The sleeping pills I have (or, I should say, had ) were Lunesta. I'm sure that you've probably heard of it. My longtime ex, when she moved out, left a bunch of the sample packs here almost two years ago now, and if I've needed to sleep quickly or if I've needed to rest up for a long while without having to worry about waking up at a set time, I'd take one. This was, and is, a very rare occurrence; I'd maybe take one once or twice a year, if that. Sometimes they'd work, sometimes they wouldn't do anything at all. It all depended on the day, really. Anyway, the one I took this afternoon was the very last one I had -- and shit, it worked. It worked very, very hard.

My stomach had been bothering me all day -- I'd been in the bathroom four or five times. I'm sure you didn't need to know this, but it relates to the story. I took that pill this afternoon and almost immediately began feeling groggy. This was good; it meant that it was working, and working well. I went downstairs to bed. Suddenly, I was too hot; I was feeling queasy and needing-to-poop-esque. By this time, I was also very, very groggy; it was akin to feeling drunk, but the sick kind of drunk -- not the fun kind. I came back upstairs and went to the bathroom, in my groggy state, and I vaguely remember going back downstairs and laying down afterwards. I remember nothing after that until after 11PM when I awoke. When I came back upstairs after waking up, I noticed that I hadn't even remembered to flush the toilet. Gross.

Ladies and gentlemen, the effects of Lunesta. But -- I slept. I slept hard, and I slept well. I got the rest I so desperately needed but was unable to acquire last night because of my pounding headache (probably brought on by allergies). So why is this post titled "Unslept and Bloodshot," then? Because since then, I've been up. Yeah. Awake. Granted, this was less than five hours ago. But I've been up. I'm not mentally tired, but my body is sure tired and achy. I'm worn out. It's not stress this time; it's more that my body is fighting me because -- as I mentioned in my last post -- I have mentally checked out for the semester now that I've passed my comps. I subconsciously don't want to go back and do anything for these last few weeks; I want that diploma put in my hand now, and I want my students to get whatever grade they have in the class now and to go on their merry ways. I can't do this, of course; I've still got two more weeks of class to teach and finals week to go. But, subconsciously, my body is telling me to stop, to give up, I'm done, etc., when I'm really not. It's a neverending battle, really. This is why I am unslept and bloodshot. I'm burned out and fully rested at the same time, and why I'm awake at 3:42 AM.

I mentioned previously that I have had several of my students reschedule their conference times with me today so that they can get them done early and out of the way. My original conference schedule would have kept me on campus until well after 3PM today; now it looks like I'll be able to get out of there around or before 2, depending on who shows up and when. This is good; I might be able to coerce Rae and Jay to go get our graduation gowns today, if we all have the time, before leaving campus. That's also going to depend quite heavily on how much extra energy I have when I'm done with my conferences, too. My mind may be more shot than usual, and I may just want to come home and crash out. I was originally planning to go to Walmart tonight in the overnight hours before I had to go in to campus this morning, but I have since decided against that -- I'm too physically tired to shamble around the store right now, even though there's some stuff I need (cat food, litter, stamps, etc). Again, if it must, that can wait another 24 hours or so until I get some sleep tonight and feel rested again. Right now I'm just...exhausted. My muscles ache with fatigue. I'm wondering if my body is trying to shake off the lingering effects of the Lunesta, still. Normally I don't have a problem with stuff like that, but my eyes feel like they have cobwebs behind them, and coffee really isn't working that well to keep me motivated and energetic. I feel more tired this morning than I did the morning of my comps, when all I wanted to do was go curl up on my electric blanket and sleep the day away.

Yet, mentally awake. Of course.

I also tend to wake up very quickly and my adrenaline starts pumping when I make my drive to campus; as you know, when I get behind the wheel of the Monte Carlo every sense in my body amplifies and I become super awake, super alert immediately. It's a reflex, all fight-or-flight and all that. I've conditioned myself to be like this because Kansas drivers are all fucking idiots.

So, I'll go to campus, I'll perform my duties admirably as always, and then I will come home and go the hell to bed. I look forward to it.

The Results, Part II

Spring semester: day sixty-seven

I received my letter yesterday morning; it was waiting in my mailbox at school when I got there, though I told Parker before leaving the house that I wasn't going to open it until he got to campus as well, so (if necessary) we could cry together if for some reason I had failed. In the interim I'd also found out that two of my friends and fellow GTAs who had taken the comps with me had gotten a "high pass" on them, including Jay. So, I waited for Parker to arrive.

"Well?" he asked when stepping out of the elevator.

"Oh, I've got the letter," I said. "I told you I wasn't going to open it until you got here."

I opened the letter, and it said (I'm paraphrasing here, since it's still on my desk at work) Congratulations, you have passed your comprehensive exams with a score of "PASS." Something like that, anyway.

Well, I'm done now. Barely 24 hours later, and I am totally checked out for the rest of the semester.

I don't even care that I didn't get a high pass or anything like that -- I don't give a flying fuck, in fact. The fact is that I've already basically graduated, and everything from this point forward is just going through the motions until the semester ends. That letter, to me, is as good as an actual diploma. It basically tells me hey, you're done, you've survived grad school and you'll get another degree for it in, oh, three weeks. We just have to print it up first.

Honestly, I feel somewhat invincible now. Academically speaking, of course. Over the course of the next three weeks, all I have to deal with is tying up all the loose ends with my students' work -- grading their final papers and exit exams and the like. None of that is particularly fun, of course, but I no longer have the stress of dealing with anything but those little things. I have relative freedom in mind and spirit.

In the overnight hours, after talking to Daisy for a little while, I tried to go back to sleep but could not; I had a massive, pounding headache that would not go away no matter what I did, and it lasted for hours. Instead, after laying in bed for over an hour as it gradually got lighter outside, I got back up, came upstairs, and finalized the design of my graduation announcements -- I printed out fifteen of them on ivory linen paper (with envelopes to match), addressed them, and sealed them. I have to get stamps before I can send them out, as I only have one stamp left right now -- and that will more than likely go to the rent check this weekend. I also need about five or six more addresses from some extended family members and family friends, especially the ones who may not know offhand that I'm graduating. Most of them are people I haven't spoken to since Christmas or beforehand, or people I shoot emails back and forth with maybe once a year. Over the years, as I so rarely send out any mail to friends and family anymore, my address book has become outdated in some places -- I have at least three addresses for my friend April, for example, which have been crossed out and marked "outdated." Eh, it happens. I think I sent out maybe six Christmas cards total last year, and two of those were to my parents and Daisy's parents, despite the fact that I spent several days with each of them over the span of about two weeks.

Regardless, those will go out next week, more than likely. I also ordered my mother a set of Mother's Day gifts off of Amazon (they'll ship tomorrow) and told her that she'll need to go to the mailbox to pick those up over the weekend or on Monday. It's so rare that I can do anything for my parents that, when I have the chance or ability, I like to do so. They've certainly done enough for me over the years.

Several friends and colleagues are holding an end-of-year graduation party on graduation night; Daisy and I are planning to attend. There's about fifteen of us who will be there (so far), including some of us who are not graduating yet but who want to see us all off properly. Daisy and I may be a little worse for wear by the time that weekend rolls around; she will have worked seven days straight in order to get that weekend off for my graduation, and I will have been grading exams and hurriedly trying to get everything put into the system for my students, as well as moving as much of my stuff out of my office as I can do myself in the interim. That includes all of my desk drawer's contents, my coffee pot, laser printer and laptop, boombox, books, papers, energy bars, etc. It's a lot of stuff. And that doesn't count whatever else I acquire when everyone else moves their stuff out and wants to get rid of everything they possibly can -- if you know me well, you know I'm a sucker for stuff like that. I'm hoping to score a free TV or something like that from somebody.

Anyway, graduation's that Friday afternoon (the 17th), with the party following directly afterwards in the evening. Let me tell you one thing -- I'm very glad Daisy doesn't drink, because this means I'll have a designated driver all set 'n ready to go. This is the figurative last blast with my friends and colleagues I've known for the past three years, and after this party I may not see some of them ever again -- people like Rae and Jay are leaving town for good shortly after graduation, and a few others are doing the same. I've already told Daisy that since I don't ever drink at any other time, I plan to get pretty sloshed with my friends there. She realizes this and certainly understands it -- it's a celebration, after all. As she knows most of my friends at this point anyway, including the majority of the people who will be attending, this isn't really a problem. For one night only, she gets to see happy, drunk Brandon make a comeback, and finally I get a chance to actually loosen up and, well, act like a normal grad student does on any other given weekend.

The next morning, Daisy and I are going back up to Omaha for a few days to spend time with her family before she has to resume her normal work schedule. This also includes showing me around parts of Omaha I haven't seen yet, as it was nut-numbingly cold and snowy the last time I was there for New Year's, and her parents also want to do a celebratory dinner (or something akin to that) while I'm there as well. She has to work one of the nights I'll be there -- I believe it's Sunday -- but we'll stay there until Wednesday or so. And after that? My schedule is...well, wide open. I should continue to be paid through at least the first half of June, but I will be doing little but looking for stable, livable employment somewhere and refining my writing. As mentioned before, I'd like to write a chronicle of graduate school, as well as do a scathing re-edit of my first book to re-release it for publication on the Kindle service and/or somewhere in print. Those things will be back-burner, though, to paying the bills and eventually getting out of Kansas -- however long that may take.

As for the rest of this week? There's not a lot else going on. I had conferences with my students all day yesterday, a trend that will continue tomorrow. Yesterday I also had to deal with some of the most horrible April weather I've ever seen -- a mix of rain, sleet, and snow with high (30-40mph) sustained winds all day long, bad enough to where it was so cold I couldn't feel my ears, and once more had to dress in layers in order to be able to stay warm. This was capped off by me going to bed last night around 6 or so, only to wake up about eight hours later with a good bit of snow on the ground here in Newton, and my car covered. Dusting to an inch, something like that. It melted off by 11AM.

I will remind you that it is April 24. And by Monday, it's supposed to be almost 80. It's ridiculous to get snow this late. Bullshit there's no such thing as climate change.

I finally brought home my old Dell laptop yesterday afternoon, after it sat in my desk drawer at school for four months, unused. I have new RAM to install in it so that I can make it a portable DVD player downstairs in my bedroom -- that will be part of my weekend activities while Daisy is at work on her normal night shifts. I also have to edit through a bunch of student workshop copies this weekend, as next week is workshop week for my students as they prepare their final papers for me. My schedule tomorrow will be somewhat strange -- normally I get home around 1PM or so, but since I've got conferences, it's all up in the air. Students are emailing me to change around their times, I don't know who's going to come in and when, etc. Once everyone's done, I can come home -- at which point I will more than likely go straight to bed, since my sleeping schedule is all sorts of screwy (as is evidenced by the fact that I'm awake at noon and have been awake since last night due to that aforementioned headache, despite trying to sleep early this morning again).

The plumbing situation is, well, okay I suppose. I drained the tub yesterday just fine and without incident, and aside from flushing the toilets and washing my hands/running some water over dirty dishes in the sink, I've not run any water at all since Monday night. I'll have to shower tonight, but other than that I don't really plan to use any large amount of water over the next several days. I do, however, need to do some big-time cleaning around the house, including scrubbing down the toilets, bathrooms, and kitchen/counters/stove. I'll probably do that over the weekend as well. I've made a new shopping list (as there are things I'm out of) and when I go take care of that, I'll get more decloggers and foamers just in case I end up needing them, but as it will be rapidly getting warmer during the foreseeable future, I won't need to be doing as much laundry because I won't be wearing layers every day anymore. I will, however, need to wash the blankets and sheets soon, though. That should be a pleasant experience if the clog isn't completely dissolved or pushed out of the system. Heavy sarcasm is, of course, intended there.

For now, as Daisy is asleep for the day, I'm going to do the same -- as I have no responsibilities for the rest of the day, I'm going to take a sleeping pill and pass out, in order to regain some of my lost rest from my headache last night that I so desperately need in order to be able to function tomorrow. Without the pill, I'll be awake all day with, ahem, reverse insomnia. I know, it's weird. Again, my sleep schedules are fucked when it comes to the majority of the week.

The Results, Part I

Spring semester: day sixty-six

I found out last night -- in the interim between showering and messing with the laundry and pipes -- that all of the MFAs received their comps results yesterday afternoon via letters in their mailboxes. My buddy Jay even received a "high pass," which is basically the best marks one can get on the comps. I'm proud of him, especially since he thought he did "just okay" or something along those lines.

I will get my own results this morning, presumably, in about 90 minutes once I'm on campus. Parker is supposed to find out his own results this week as well, from his first question of the MA comps he took on Friday.

I'm nervous and my allergies are killing me. I had to take a sleeping pill last night in order to force myself to sleep through the night, as I am forced to be on campus all day today for conferences -- 8AM through 2:40, one after another, back-to-back to back with no real breaks whatsoever. As you may have guessed, I'm not particularly looking forward to this. My allergies are killing me because in the past twelve hours, the temperature has gone from 70 to 36 degrees, and it's currently raining/sleeting/wet-snowing with 25-35mph winds. The weather forecast was right, apparently, and when it changes that rapidly, it destroys my allergies -- runny nose, watery eyes, awful congestion, the works. I'm going to try to leave a little early in order to drive a bit more slowly if necessary. The roads just look wet and it's above freezing here, and the ground sure as hell isn't frozen, but people drive like idiots in shitty weather, and the last thing I want to do is get into an accident three weeks before graduation.

The laundry/towels are done and have run their course in the dryer, but I have not yet drained the tub. I want to wait until I get home this afternoon to do so, as if I wait that long then I can be assured that everything has been drained out of the system and draining the tub shouldn't be a problem. The washer didn't give me any more issues last night when I let the rest of the drain/spin cycle run, which tells me that my theories of the pipes being mostly clear or being able to take about 30 gallons or so of water at one time before they back up is roughly correct -- the clog is either mostly dissolved/broken up or it's been pushed much further down the pipe from where it was before, but either way, it seems to be much better than before. Not worried about it for the moment, really.

I plan to leave the house in about fifteen minutes; this is going to be a stressful day for a number of reasons, the least of which are my travels to school and back in the shitty weather. As mentioned, I have conferences all day today. I also have them for the same length of time on Thursday, though with less students (most of them are coming in today). No, most of the stress is attributed to that letter sitting in my mailbox on campus right now, the one that says I'll either get to graduate next month or I won't. It's been so long since comps that I'd almost forgotten that I took them, and I've certainly forgotten most of the vast amount of information I read and studied to take them. I do, ironically, remember most of what my essays for those comps entailed, however.

For now, though, I must dress in layers and traverse the roads to get to campus. The heater in the Monte Carlo is less than ideal and takes a bit to warm up, so I'll be wearing two shirts, two pairs of pants, gloves, a coat, and thick shoes. Oy.

Stocked and Loaded, Part IV

Spring semester: day sixty-five

I went to bed last night with a feeling of hope; I let the washer finish its drain and spin cycle, and both the cat room drain and the drain under the washer remained bone-dry. Hm, I thought. Perhaps that Max Gel I poured down the drain when it was standing water after it overflowed the last time finally did it and dissolved the clog.

Mind you, I hadn't run any water, nor had I started the washer again, which I will have to do yet again because the one remaining towel I had was used to soak up the previous overflow, and the overflow also had a fair amount of bleach in it from the decloggers. On a black towel. Again, sigh. I had to throw it in with the others which were already half-washed, as I had nowhere else to put it, so the previously clean towels in the washer are now once more soiled.

I don't really care, to be honest with you -- a towel is a towel, and even if it's discolored in spots because of contact with bleach, once it's washed clean it'll still work the same as it always did. Not everything I own has to be pretty -- take a look at my car, for example.

I was previously thinking that, before bed, I should once more get dressed and go to Walmart again in the night in order to get more supplies if/when they will be necessary, but after the washer finished draining and spinning with no issue or backwash, I changed my mind. If I need to get that stuff, I'll go get it later today, but here's the plan for today:

1. Before I do anything else or run any more water, shower. With the drain plug sealed. This will allow me to get that out of the way and clean myself, and when I drain it 30 seconds at a time it will be a good test for the drains themselves -- if they bubble up again I'll know the clog isn't fixed. If they don't, well, the clog may still not be completely gone, but as it'll be the only water I've run through the pipes in over twelve hours, it'll let me gauge how much of it is still a problem. As you may recall, I was able to dump the entire wash cycle's worth of water from the washer yesterday when I washed the towels the first time -- a good 15 gallons or more -- with no issue and no backup whatsoever once I put the first foamer down the pipes. If I can shower and let the water drain completely with no issue, that'll be roughly the same amount of water down the drains, more or less.

2. If it does back up again, before I do anything else, I let it dry out and apply the foamer and/or the rest of the Max Gel to help kick it along, dump the bottle of bleach down the drain(s), and go out to get more supplies. I have to get stamps anyway, so it's not like that would be the only reason I'd leave the house. It's warm today, too, before the snow hits tomorrow. Yes, more fucking snow.

 
See? Not fucking kidding.
 

3. Repeat the process from yesterday; run the laundry, see how much/if it backs up, and each time it does (if it does), continue to pour uncloggers down all holes, rinsing with water and alternating with doses of bleach. Again, it's all draining out, even if slowly at times -- so everything I'm putting down the drains must be hitting the clog(s) as it flows through. It's only a matter of time until it's all washed out. This is the only logical thought process I can have on the matter.



When I got up this afternoon, I poured the last foamer down the drain under the washer and let it sit for well over an hour. I debated on doing this, but I wanted to do everything I could before I showered and tested the washer again, in hopes that anything that could be kicked out or dissolved with the last foamer I have would be. I then went upstairs and took a shower, making sure the stopper was pulled closed, and showered as quickly as possible to minimize water use -- if it's going to overflow when I drain it, after all, I wanted to make sure it would overflow as little as possible. There's probably four inches of water in the fairly small tub; that's maybe twenty gallons or so, give or take, by eyeballing it. That's slightly more than a full washer load uses, I'm guessing.

I also came to a big, problematic debate here -- once I flush out the drain under the washer, do I test the washer first or do I drain the tub first? My original plan, as you know, was to drain the tub first and to see what happens with that, but that's also more water than the washer produces (again, I'm guessing) and if it begins to overflow, I can't immediately stop the tub like I can stop the washer -- I'd have to run back upstairs, burning about ten seconds when it would be overflowing through one or both drains. On the other hand, I don't want to let dirty shower water sit in the tub upstairs any longer than I have to.

After hemming and hawwing for a while, I decided to flush the drain and start the washer load again. If it overflowed or backed up, I thought, I could shut it down and use the rest of the Max Gel on the drain again before continuing, and unlike the shower drain, I can control the water flow of the washer. Later, once the water levels go down (if it was still clogged) I could empty the tub little by little.

I flushed the drain and ran the washer load, again, full and hot water. First cycle went beautifully -- wash and drain. Not a drop of overflow in either drain; both stayed dry. I thought maybe the foamer had finally fully worked and knocked out whatever was in the line. I let the second cycle start, the rinse cycle, which fills the washer again, but it is much shorter -- I'm guessing about five minutes. Remember this, as it's important.

When the rinse cycle completed and began to drain, I thought: Okay, here it is, the moment of truth. 

It drained well. I watched it. I stopped it about halfway through the drain cycle, and I'm glad I did -- the moment I hit the stop button it had started to come back up into the drain. It drained out quickly, though. I checked the drain in the cat room and it had some water in it as well, but wasn't even a quarter of the way filled up (that drain is bowl-shaped, not a grate, and larger). When I stopped the washer, everything receded quickly.


Hm, I thought. So the drainage system can take about thirty or so gallons at a time, roughly, before it's full and backs up. This is, despite what it may seem, good news. This means that the clog has either been mostly broken up or that it's been pushed down the line far enough to where it will take more water, and more time, to back things up. It also means that once the water has been drained out of the lines, an average washer load (not a super-big load) or average shower should not overflow the drains anymore. In essence, I am slowly winning this battle. I think it overflowed again on the drain/spin cycle about halfway through it because it is much shorter -- there is still water in the lines draining out from the wash cycle.

I did nothing else with any uncloggers; the water isn't standing, but draining almost as quickly as it backs up. That means that there's good flow going already, and once the pipes are emptied out (I'll give 'em another hour or so) I'll finish draining the washer and let it complete its cycle, as that should be more than enough time to dump the last 5-8 gallons or so out of the washer for its drain/spin cycle. And maybe that water that's quickly flowing out will help break up the clog more and/or move it further out of the system. Couldn't hurt, right?


After that, I'll wait another two or three hours and slowly drain the tub before bed. I've already showered (and don't plan to shower again in the morning before I leave the house) and the towels were the only laundry I had, so normal water use of washing my hands, flushing the toilet, or running the dishwasher (which uses very little water, actually) when I need to sometime this coming week shouldn't clog anything up, and I'll watch the drains when I shower and drain the tub over the next several days. What I'm saying is that basically, for the moment, the battle is over until the next time I have to do laundry or run a lot of water at one time, which shouldn't be for another week or so (read: when I have time to deal with it if it acts up again).

Again, it's not completely over; I will still probably have to go get more unclogger products, and I will still have to keep an eye on everything, and I may still have to call my landlord at some point over the next month or so if I come to a point where I'm no longer making headway on the issue. But, for right now, I've come to a stopping point; I'm making some sort of progress, and I know how much water I can actually run down the drains at any given time before they back up, which is a lot more than I could before. Not to mention that I still have half a bottle of Max Gel and almost a full bottle of bleach. I should be able to win this fight outright eventually.

Stocked and Loaded, Part III

This shit is seriously starting to irritate me. Like, no foolin'.

I started phase three by pouring a good 1/3 of the bottle of bleach down the drain under the washer, and then followed it with a full 10-quart bucket of hot water. I waited an hour for that to flow through the pipes and empty out/dry up, and dumped foamer #2 down the cat room drain. I waited another hour and flushed out the foamer with another 10-quart bucket of water, and it drained quickly and cleanly, as if anything that was in the drain between the cat room and washer was now completely cleared -- and moreover, it did not bubble up into the drain under the washer when I flushed it. This was a good sign.

The washer, as mentioned before, was stopped at the rinse/spin cycle with the towels, which would be the completion of that load. I started it again once everything had been flushed out in order to see if it would drain out and spin completely to a stop without overflowing the bottom drain again (it was about 2/3 empty of its water when I stopped it). It drained almost all of its remaining water out before it once more began to bubble up through the floor drain and gurgle in the cat room. Sigh. What the fuck, man? I once more stopped it, but this time I was pissed and was taking no prisoners -- since there was still standing water that was draining slowly in the drain under the washer, I dumped about half the remaining bottle of Max Gel in there with it to let it go down and hit the clog, wherever it may be.

And that's the end of phase three.

Phase four will be, as I've basically exhausted most of my other options at this point, dump everything I have into all drains and flush them repeatedly, over and over, until whatever clog is in there is flushed out and/or broken up. And if that doesn't clear it completely, buy more Max Gel and foamers to repeat the process until it does, as I seem to be making at least a little bit of headway. Regardless, my "drain surgery" is basically done for tonight; I will try to drain the towels one more time before bed in order to see if I can further push the Max Gel down against the clog to destroy it, but if I can't or it backs up again, I'll basically repeat the same process I did today when I get up tomorrow, using the last foamer, the last of the Max Gel, and the bleach before moving on to the baking soda and vinegar if necessary -- and if that doesn't help much, buy more of that stuff tomorrow and repeat. If I do it enough times with enough stuff, it'll more than likely break up anything that's in there clogging up the works. As it does drain, albeit slowly sometimes (and quickly other times) that unclogging stuff must be hitting it and doing something to it. As it's kind of important that I be able to shower without worrying about whether I'm going to flood the basement every time I do so, I need to take care of this vigorously and ceaselessly until it's cleared out. I've made the decision that I'll buy a shitload of Drano, foamers, and bleach three times (I've already done so once, of course) and if it's still screwing up, I'll have no choice but to call my landlord and see what he can do about the problem -- as, if it reaches that point, I will have poured close to five gallons of unclogger stuff down the drains in my house, which should be enough to dissolve a body were one to be stuck in there (spoiler alert: there's not a body stuck in there). I'll start with the last foamer in the drain under the washer tomorrow morning, and follow up with the rest of the Max Gel in the cat room drain if that doesn't clear it out. After that, it's bleach and hot water to flush anything I can out of there, and baking soda/vinegar in the proper proportions as well if that doesn't work. I have to do this quickly, again; I desperately need a shower, and can't shower if the drains are backing up like crazy over and over. Well, I can shower, but I have to keep the tub plugged and drain it out very, very, very slowly over a few hours, about 30 seconds worth of draining at a time. With me spending all day Tuesday on campus in conferences with my students one-on-one, I'd rather not have to do that with unwashed, greasy hair and oily skin.

"You may have to call the landlord anyway," Daisy told me tonight. "I mean, this stuff happens on occasion, especially in an old house. Your house is old, babe."

"My house was built in the '70s, honey," I said. "It's not that old. And I don't know what the hell could be clogging it anyway. It's not like I'm flushing tampons down the toilet or anything like that."

I even get the really cheap toilet paper that basically dissolves as soon as water touches it. It could just be a buildup of years upon years worth of crud/hair/etc., but even that should be flushed out with all of the unclogger stuff. Even when/if I do get it unclogged, it's not like I'm not going to watch it cautiously every time I do laundry or take a shower over the course of a few weeks or months afterwards to make sure these issues don't come back. I have a feeling these issues are going to be recurring ones from time to time, which is yet another reason I hope to be able to get a job and a home out-of-state once I graduate next month -- let the next person who has this place deal with the plumbing issues if I can't keep 'em fixed.

So -- phase four begins tomorrow morning, the "dump everything down there and let it destroy all it comes across" phase. Again, there's only so much I can do, and it's a lot of trial-and-error. Dump and flush, dump and flush, try the washer again, etc. If it works, it works.

Stocked and Loaded, Part II

Okay. Well.

I'll say that this story at least starts off well.

After I poured the Drano Max Gel into the drain in the cat room, I let it sit for an hour or so. When I went back down there, the drain had emptied and dried out. I filled my 10-quart bucket with hot water, and poured it down that drain. It drained really smoothly and quickly. Hm. Okay. Maybe that took care of the rest of the clog, I thought. I started the washer again.

It didn't get halfway through the drain cycle before it gurgled and bubbled up through both drains like crazy -- and this time, under the washer, it was kicking up all sorts of gunk from the drain in the bathroom as well. Fuck. Double-fuck, because I don't exactly know what this means. My first thoughts were that the clogging was kicked further down the line to exactly where the washer drains, which would explain all of the gunk from the bathroom drain coming up under there. A further thought after that was that at least it seemed to be moving somewhat, and that I was correct in my first assumption that drainage water from upstairs (where I've not run any water today) will hit the drain in the cat room before it hits the drain under the washer -- and that the drain field must be out of the front of the house and not the back if it's moving the clog(s) along and it's all coming up through the drain under the washer. That may mean it's clogged in two places, or just one big clog somewhere in one.

I assessed the situation. I have two bottles of foamer left, half a bottle of Max Gel, an entire bottle of bleach (which, let's be honest, is basically what most drain cleaners consist of) and an entire bottle of vinegar/huge box of baking soda. The clog(s) are being moved, or at least are being partially broken up by the stuff I've put down the drains thus far, and I have enough stuff left to try to wash them the rest of the way out. This is good. This is a plus, even if it looks sort of shitty right now. Phase two is over. This is where I enter phase three. This is what phase three consists of:


1. First and foremost, flush the drain under the washer with hot water and a good amount of bleach once it's dried up and drained completely. That should get any remnants of the clogged gunk from the cat room moving further through the pipes, and the added bleach will help whatever's left of the previous Max Gel and foamer move through the pipes and keep working as well.

2. Put a foamer down the drain in the cat room after the water from the front drain under the washer has completely drained out and dried up, and has moved everything else down through those pipes more, to kick out anything that's left, then flush that drain with more hot water as well after the appropriate amount of time has passed.

3. Let the load of towels finish and drain, even if I have to keep stopping it and it keeps backing up, so that they can be dried and used again if it overflows more. I have no clean towels in the house anymore, not even dish towels. Again, this will also get more water moving through the drains, and hopefully will continue to kick that clog out with the added bleach and foamer.


As I told Daisy when I updated her on my progress, this is more of a trial-and-error process than anything else. Kick the clog(s) down the drains further and further until they/it either breaks up or is flushed out, by any means necessary. If it takes a while, oh well, it takes a while. Can't do much about that. If I have to go purchase another $30 of plumbing supplies, then I'll have to as long as they keep working. Right now, I'm doing all I can do myself, slowly, and am doing my best to get this stuff unclogged and moving. I'd like to save at least part of the bottle of the Max Gel to run down through the shower as well, to get anything in those pipes and to use the draining shower to my advantage, if necessary, but that would be the very last thing I'd do after I'm sure the drains are (mostly) clear.

So, that being said, let's start phase three...

Stocked and Loaded, Part I

Last night, after the conclusion of my previous post, I sat here at my desk for a moment to think. I had two options -- I could either go out to Walmart then and get the stuff I needed to take care of the drain situation, or I could go to bed, get up, and go fight the Sunday afternoon crowd.

Sigh. I don't want to do that. Fuck. Looks like I'm doing it tonight.

I got up, got dressed, and at 4:10 in the morning got into the Monte Carlo and went to Walmart, where I was one of only three customers in the store.


Big bottle of Drano Max Gel: $6.98.
Three bottles of Drano Foaming Pipe Snake at $3.87 each: $11.61.
One gallon of white vinegar: $2.38.
The biggest box of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda I could find: $2.24.
One gallon of bleach: $3.24.
One 10-quart bucket: $1.98.
________________________________________________________________

Grand total for drain-cleaning justice: $28.43.


It wasn't until I'd gotten home that I realized I'd forgotten to get more new towels. And, because I got the other stuff, I didn't get the 2L bottles of Coke. But I did, however, purchase two new Hawaiian shirts. Because, after all, I'm me. Go figure.

The foaming pipe snake is guaranteed to clear any clog. It says so right on the bottle. I have three bottles of it to try on the two different drains, as well as a third as an extra (oh yes, I planned this out). If that can't get it, the massive bottle of "Max Gel" stuff will. I've found recipes to mix the baking soda and vinegar in the proper proportions so that it won't hurt the pipes as well (something Daisy was worried about) in case I need to use that too. The bleach is to clean out the drains, especially the one in the closet of the cat room, before and after the flushing procedure. The bucket is to be able to put water in the drains so that the stuff can work -- plus, I needed a bucket around the house anyway. For...um...bucket-y things.

I decided, after checking the drains again to make sure that they'd completely emptied and dried, that I would wait until I got up in the afternoon before I went on the attack. In addition to the tools and chemicals listed above, I also have a pair of industrial rubber gloves (purchased long ago, for when I make tie-dyes) and a tough, awesome plunger. Hopefully the latter won't be necessary.

"Why don't you call the landlord?" Daisy asked me. "Because this is really his issue."

Again, I really don't want to bug the man for something I should be able to take care of myself. Spending $28 on some drain-flushing things is a lot cheaper than him calling the Roto-Rooter people out to the house. If this doesn't work, that may happen anyway, but I want to at least try to fix it myself if at all possible. My landlord's been really good to me over the years -- I don't want to bother him unless absolutely necessary, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever had to call him about anything. I'd like to continue that trend if at all possible.

Mind you, I knew going in that this could go very badly; I don't know, again, exactly where this clog is, or why it disappears for a while before reappearing and causing problems again. Up until last night I was sure that it was a drain field issue, after all -- but I did know that it was somewhere between the washer and the drainage for the house, which means that it was probably in the main drainage line somewhere. If that's the case, I figured, then, theoretically, putting this stuff in *any* drain in the house should at least do *something* to help clear it. I simply wanted to put it in the closest drain(s) possible.

Also mind you that I am not a plumber. For a man of age thirty, I have a rather limited skill set, and that skill set simply does not include plumbing. The most knowledge I know about this is because my parents had a similar issue with their own plumbing, where the pipe would get clogged at the entrance to their septic tank -- but I do not have a septic tank. My system is different if for just that fact alone.

Dammit, Jim! I'm a poet, not a plumber!

Anyway.


Despite my apprehensions and knowledge that my work would not necessarily be pleasant in the least, I resolved to deal with it when I woke up and went to bed. When I awaken, I thought, your clogged ass is mine.

Which, in retrospect, sounds really horrific when taken out of context.

When I awoke, I read the directions on one of the bottles of foaming stuff -- it said to pour the whole bottle down the drain, wait for an hour, and then flush the drain with hot water. Okay, I can do that. So, as a first test, I uncapped it and poured it down the drain under the washer, as that's where I first experienced the drain backing up. I also had that load of wet/dirty towels in the washer which needed to be washed with hot water, so my plan was to, in an hour's time, go down there and start the washer to let it run a load -- and to watch it, to see if it would overflow or visibly back up again. The hot water from the washer would give the drain line the water it needed to flush out whatever was down there. If it worked, it worked, and I'd have some extra bottles of that stuff to use if it popped up again, and I'd use the bucket and bleach to flush out the other drain in the bathroom closet. If it didn't work, or didn't work completely, I thought, well, those extra bottles of stuff would come in useful.

I waited that hour, during which I made coffee, fed the cats, and attempted to wake up a little more, and decided on my backup plan during that time -- if the foamer didn't clear the clog completely, I'd wait until the drain under the washer backed up enough to have water in it, and then I'd stop it, pour the recommended amount of the "Max Gel" down that drain, and once more wait the hour for that stuff to clear it before continuing. I wasn't going to mess with the drain in the cat room closet until I did a little experimentation, especially as I was pretty sure the clog -- or whatever it was -- was out past the washer and not in the drain back there, as the cat room is behind the washer.

When the hour passed, I set the washer for a heavy load, on hot water, at its fullest setting. I needed to do this to clean the towels anyway, obviously, but I also wanted it to be as hot and full as possible to flush that foamer stuff out of the lines, and with it whatever clog there may have been present as well. I let it run its wash cycle and get to the drain cycle -- this was the moment of truth, when I would be able to see if the foamer worked.

On a drain cycle with a full washer of hot water, it didn't come up through the bottom drain under the washer. At all. Didn't bubble up even a little bit. I was amazed. Holy shit. All that, and that's all it needed? A foaming unclogger bottle? I let it fill up again for the rinse cycle and watched it. It went through its rinse cycle fine, as expected, but what I was waiting for was the drain and spin cycle, again, to see what would happen.

It hit the drain cycle and again drained admirably, but I heard gurgling. Wait, what? I looked down at my feet. The washer drain was fine. The gurgling was coming from the drain in the cat room. Again, what? I immediately shut the washer off and went into the cat room to open the closet. I luckily (very luckily) have untiled, concrete floors in that closet, and the drain there was full, bubbled up, but not overflowing.

Hm.

I had assumed, perhaps falsely, that the waste drain would run out of the front of the house into the sewer system, out past the water meter (which is right behind my mailbox), not behind the house and wayyyy under the foundation and back grass. There would be no real reason to do that. But, again, I can't see those pipes or the main line; all I know is where those two drains are.

I began thinking. Okay, the foamer did *something* at least; it either dissolved most of the "clog" or whatever it is, because the washer drain didn't back up and overflow at all this time even on the washer's biggest load. However, the other drain in the cat room is gurgling and filling up, which means that whatever it is, it isn't completely cleared yet. Hm.

I turned off the washer completely and began phase two of my plan -- I poured half the bottle of the Max Gel into the slowly-draining, standing water in the drain in the cat room. If it's backing up there, the clog is somewhere between that and where it drains out into the system -- apparently the foamer got some of it, but not enough. And, again, I'm not sure where the drain system even goes or how it leaves the house, but now I know that this drain is indeed clogged somehow, at least. I am letting that sit before using the bucket to flush it with hot water in an hour or so, in hopes that will clear it completely. Then, I will restart the washer again from the beginning to see what happens.

So, dear reader, my battle continues. It's not over yet. But I'm making headway.

Swamped

I came home Thursday afternoon from teaching, ate a quick lunch (even though I'm still somewhat suffering from acid reflux/heartburn issues) and crashed. I slept so hard and so deeply that when I awoke around 9PM and it was dark, I didn't remember what day it was, what time of day it was, or what I'd been doing before I went to sleep or needed to do once I got up. I was in, ahem, panic mode. Then it slowly came back to me. Today is Thursday, right? I think? Yeah. It's Thursday. I taught this morning. I collected my students' Proposals and Annotated Bibliographies, and came home and went to bed. 

I'm not making this up; these were my actual thought processes. I was disoriented and jarred. I've been so stressed out and worn down that -- even though comps are behind me now and done with, and have been for two weeks -- I can't fully recover and get my body and mental state back to completely normal. Thus, whenever I sleep I generally don't have a problem falling asleep, but it's a problem with staying asleep and not waking up in a panic or a jumble and thinking I am automatically shirking responsibilities somehow. Over the past three months I wired my brain to immediately start processing things when I wake up on school days, or even on days I'm off, when I had pressing things to do (such as reading/studying hundreds of pages a day for comps). Now, even after all of that stuff is mostly over, I still wake up in a panic sometimes -- oh gods, what time is it, what day is it, did I oversleep? Should I be teaching right now? Why am I not studying? Etc. And it does take a minute or three to completely orient myself and allow my memory to come back -- but by that time, I'm fully awake and can't sleep again. That, dear reader, is stress, and the after-effects of the stress I was under for a long, long time. Now, mind you, I am still under stress, but it is nowhere near the amount I was under leading up to comps. I still have daily tasks that are time-consuming; I still have to grade student papers, I still have to pay bills, do laundry and take care of errands/shopping, and make sure I can stay on top of everything so that I don't fall behind.

Through all of this of course, while I do sleep, I've been sleeping shittily. I'll sleep for five or six hours at a time at most, regardless of how tired I am, before waking up in the aforementioned fashion above. It is this and the constant bombardment by my allergies that is making me incredibly tired and fairly antisocial most of the time. I feel sluggish and not all "with it" a fair amount of the time I'm awake, and I know my allergies are a big part of it. Thursday was April 18, and when I went to teach my class at 9:30 AM, it was snowing. Yes, snowing.


Go home, Winter. You're drunk.

Tonight, in the overnight hours, it's 57, which is a more reasonable, expected low temperature for Kansas two-thirds of the way through April. However, this means nothing -- even though it's supposed to be relatively warm tomorrow and Monday (50s, 60s-ish), Tuesday it's supposed to be 39 for a high, below freezing at night, and it's supposed to rain/sleet/snow all day.

Tuesday is April 23. WTF.

Again, can we get an actual spring, please? I don't remember any year I've been alive where it's been snowing into late April and where I haven't been wearing shorts and flip-flops everywhere for weeks by this time. None of this makes any damned sense. I don't remember any April on record where we've been under freeze warnings at night in the two weeks or so leading up to the end of the semester. It's tornado season, and while we'll occasionally get a good, strong thunderstorm for a little while, maybe with just a bit of hail, it's too cold for tornadoes to happen. For those, you actually need some warm air.

Not that I want tornadoes, mind you, I'm just saying.

The drain is still backing up into my basement on occasion, and it is doing it now sometimes even when I shower (which isn't a good thing, of course). There is no real rhyme or reason to it -- sometimes it'll be just fine, others it'll back up and overflow under my washer. Tomorrow or Monday I plan to go out and do a little shopping for some Drano or something of that nature (I have to get stamps anyway), and the next time I shower, I plan to pour a bottle or two of it down the drain when I let the shower drain out, also pouring another bottle down the downstairs drain to see if it helps. What I do know is that until recently, the shower never made it back up, only the washer, so if there's something lodged in there or there's a clog somewhere in the line, it's somewhere out past where the shower drain meets up with the washer drain. Again, I couldn't tell you what it is, as if it were an actual big clog somewhere in the works, it would be draining slowly (or not at all) all the time, and not just occasionally. As I've run several large loads of laundry a day sometimes in addition to taking a shower and/or running the dishwasher with no issues, I honestly cannot tell you what the hell is down there or out there. Maybe a few bottles of Drano will clear out whatever it is -- it's either that or call my landlord and tell him to get someone to snake all the pipes in the house (or the main drainage line), which would not only be expensive for him but probably, overall, unnecessary. I've been reading up on a lot of home-remedies for clogs; some of them are as simple as pouring baking soda and vinegar down your drain or emptying a two-liter of Coca-Cola down it, as it's acidic enough on its own to break through most stuff, in addition to the carbonation. There's little else I can do for the moment, and as long as it doesn't get really bad, if it requires the full work-up it may have to wait until after graduation before I can really have the time to do anything about it like call the landlord or get the pipes snaked to see what the problem is. Until then I sort of have to keep an eye on things and only use water/do laundry when absolutely necessary, lest I make any problems worse.

Daisy is having a hard week at work -- she's management at her job, and it's her duty to work what's called "tickets," which is a short way of saying that she's doing work that she hasn't necessarily been properly trained how to do, and is really the responsibility of people she's supposed to be managing. However, when they're swamped, she has little choice in the matter and must help out in whatever way she can. Well, this week they're really swamped, which means that when she's at work in the overnight hours -- when we'd usually be able to chat via Facebook occasionally -- she's been very silent because she's busting her ass all night long on her shift. Of course, as you know, the nights she's at work are the nights when I'm off from school, so we maybe get to Skype, briefly, an hour per night -- maybe two if she gets up early enough -- before she must leave for work, whether either of us like it or not. As much as we both generally dislike this, we know it's necessary; she's working to pay her bills as much as I am working to pay mine, and when she's at work I usually have pretty pressing matters to take care of as well. For example, last night I was grading all of my students' aforementioned Proposals and Annotated Bibliographies in preparation for their final paper, which will come in on the last day of class in a little over two weeks. Tonight I did the dishes and ran a load of laundry (which, of course, I had to keep stopping over and over so that it didn't overflow the downstairs drain).

Update: I think I have found the drain problem. There is a clog, somewhere, in the downstairs part of the main line.

Where this clog is, I don't know. And I know that it's only a partial clog, as evidenced by the fact that the household drains will run empty and the drain under the washer will as well.

Here's what I do know, and what I found out tonight -- there's a secondary overflow drain in the downstairs bathroom (read: cat room) closet, which I didn't know about before. I found this out when, as a test, I flushed the toilet upstairs and drained the sink of its dirty dishwater at the same time, which caused said drain to gurgle and overflow all over the bathroom floor -- requiring me, once more, to use every towel I had to clean up the mess (and basically scrub the floor of the cat room clean). I also know that all of the upstairs drains, including the tub and sinks, drain out very quickly and perfectly fine, not slowly at all, so the clog is somewhere between that bottom, previously unknown drain, and where the water exits the house into the waste system. Bingo. Now I know exactly where to pour the foaming pipe snakes once I get them -- one down the drain under the washer, and if that doesn't fix it, another down that previously unknown drain (and repeat ad nauseum). The overflow drain under the washer must connect up with that secondary drain, as otherwise it wouldn't have overflowed it, and the one under the washer overflows first. And, as it is (apparently) not going to go away on its own this time, I have a new mission for tomorrow. I'd do it tonight; go out and get the stuff now, deal with it now, etc, but I don't plan to run any more water tonight and it's three in the morning -- I'm tired. And, before I tackle it, I'd like to let any remaining water in the system drain out first. Whenever I awaken tomorrow, regardless of when that may be, I'll be going to Walmart and/or Dillons to stock up on drain-clearing supplies of all sorts, and we'll see who wins this battle.

I've got two more days off, plumbing system -- time for you to submit to your master.

Shopping list: at least four bottles of foaming pipe snake, two 2L bottles of Coca-Cola, a gallon of vinegar, the biggest box of baking soda I can find, a gallon of bleach, and about four or five more thick towels. Your move.

Anyway.

I have still yet to receive my comps results; the MFA director said that we should get an official letter on or around April 22; well, the 22nd is Monday, and I'm not on campus on Monday. The department is certainly taking its sweet time on that, as was told to us they may, but it's still damned peculiar. There is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, apparently, that we may not be privy to as simple students and GTAs. What I do know is that it's never taken this long before to receive comps results back -- and, as previously mentioned, it's not just me but all of us who took them. The MAs, including Parker, took their own comps (or at least the first question of theirs, since the MAs can split theirs up) on Friday -- and I absolutely expected to have our results back before the MAs took theirs. Hell, I was expecting, really, to have my results back almost two weeks ago now, but then again I should have learned by this point to lower my expectations on almost everything in life.

My next two or three weeks are going to be crazy busy, both at home and at school. Aside from the plumbing stuff, I do have to spend an inordinate amount of time grading papers, as next week I get workshop copies during conferences and the week after that I will be grading final papers before the exit exam -- which of course, I will also have to grade. While I was able to vacuum the house on Friday, I still have to clean the kitchen and scrub down the upstairs bathroom (the latter of which I've been putting off mainly because of the drainage issues), and once I do figure out the drains I have another load of sopping wet towels to wash now as well in the washing machine, something that'll just have to wait -- as much as I hate to leave dirty, wet towels in the washer due to possible mold/mildew forming on or in them -- until a day or two from now, if not longer. I can't really avoid that. Not to mention that I need to find a day/time to go over to the bookstore on campus and get my cap and gown in order to walk in the graduation ceremony, print and mail out (once I get stamps and my comps results) my graduation announcements, and take care of all sorts of other myriad issues that can, and probably will, pop up between now and May 17th. Daisy mentioned that she's going to get an oil change in her car soon, which reminded me that I need one in the Monte Carlo pretty soon as well, if I'm not already overdue for one. I also need to look for jobs and to rebuild/revise my CV so that I can start applying to different places. And, to top everything else off, once it gets warm enough and stays that way, I need to start mowing the grass again, as it's growing well (but every three days it drops below freezing and/or snows).

See, despite the amount of "free time" I supposedly have, there's a lot of things that need to be done which continually fill that time. No wonder I haven't been sleeping well or sleeping for long stretches of time -- all of this stuff is continually running through my mind, and I have to section off hours and days to deal with it all. The plumbing issue is just the first and most important of that stuff right now, and the one that I have to take care of so that I'm not continually freaking out about it.