Cometh the Fall, Part I

Well, hello again everyone.

In the time since we've returned home from North Carolina, a lot of things have transpired. Some of it was in process or happened right before we left on the trip, and some of it flew under the radar and I never got the chance to really cover it due to the fact that life moves forever forward at its own pace. Things that were very significant at the time become part of the new normal and so forth -- I'm sure you all understand what I mean. 

To those ends, fall has started -- obviously, it's almost November now. This isn't that significant to a lot of people because, well, to them the unofficial start of fall is the end of Labor Day weekend, or when the kids go back to school, or when Starbucks begins selling their Pumpkin Spice Lattes again. Truth be told, I haven't given a shit about fall for many years. I don't live in WV anymore so I rarely get to see any good fall foliage (Nebraska does have a lot of trees, but it also does have Nebraska weather, which means it's fall for a week, then it's winter, then it's summer for two more weeks before a wind/rain/ice storm blows all the pretty leaves off the trees and it goes cold and snowy for four months). 

I still get a bit of residual excitement for fall, and I don't know why. I think it's because of hoodie weather, football, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and the leftover feeling (from my days in education, both as a student and as a professor) of something new starting. As a kid, and even into my college years, I remember feeling both excited and apprehensive about the beginning of a new school year -- not for the work, mind you, but for the social/show-off aspect of it all. In grade school/high school, it was all about appearances and acquisitions -- showing off new school clothing, whatever new Magic cards or video games I'd gotten over the summer, discovering and sharing new music (it was the 90s, so there was a lot of good still happening back then). In college the new clothing thing was still a small part of it, yes, but it was also reconnecting with friends you hadn't necessarily seen or had been able to keep in contact with over the summer -- plus, at the beginning of the year, I had money -- refund-check-from scholarships money, sometimes thousands of dollars of it. I vividly remember going to the record store/convenience store/smoke shop on campus, The Den, and slowly building my music collection disc by disc -- sometimes new, sometimes used -- and picking up a carton of Camel Turkish Golds when they used to be about $28 a carton about once every two weeks or so for a few months on end, until the money began to dwindle down and I'd more closely have to budget it. 

The Den does not exist anymore; it closed its doors over a decade ago, and when it did it felt like the final nail in the coffin of many fond memories of my college years.

Now, fall just feels like it gets colder and I spend more time indoors in more layers of clothing than I'm generally used to. Daisy does not care for football, despite me trying to get her into it over the past decade or so. Starbucks will deliver Pumpkin Spice Lattes to me, if I want them to, in all of the hours of the day, except the ones where I'm awake and working in the overnight. I don't have anyone to impress with any new/exciting fall clothing, or new music/video games/etc, since I'm no longer in school and I work from home. Fall now feels like a time where I have to begin preparing for the holidays, experience the holidays and somehow come out alive, and then spend three months of miserable winter inside growling about the cold and the snow, while also trying to stay active and watch my diet to keep my diabetes under control. Oh, and paying down the bills from the holidays.

Last month marked five years in this house -- since we bought it, closed on it, received the keys and moved into it that very same day. It does not feel like it has been five years in many respects, and yet in some others it feels far longer. I love this house for its many features and its many improvements we've added to it (or made into an improvement by removing something from it) -- when we bought it, we had a flat backyard with string lights going across it, connected to the tree and the porch, had a recessed stairway in the corner of the backyard with a large storage shed, and had two giant silver maple trees in the front yard, separated by a cute little walkway. 

Now, the string lights are gone, the shed got taken down and the recessed stairway removed when the retaining wall collapsed (there's a rock bed and a bonfire peach tree there in that corner of the yard now, put in after the retaining wall was rebuilt), half of the back yard is Daisy's giant garden, and both of the giant silver maple trees were removed from the front yard due to storm and carpenter-ant damage. We need some major landscaping work done around the house that we can't really afford or have time to do ourselves, and the house itself needs some little odds-and-ends sorts of TLC that we also don't really have the time or money for either.

However, I will say that over the course of the summer, we began upgrading some of the things in the house one by one. The first of those, as I mentioned a while back, was the microwave -- the old one blew up for the third or fourth time, and Daisy said she was done with getting it fixed over and over, so she just took it upon herself to get a new one ordered and installed.

Following the microwave was our bed. 

Now, we bought our last bed in 2017. It was a Sealy, Serta, something like that, and it was about $800 -- which at the time we thought was ludicrous. Within two years or so, the box springs began breaking down; Daisy removed them, stripped them, and turned them into trellises in the garden. We put the mattress directly on the bedframe (which was a solid frame, not a skeleton frame). Then, per Daisy, the sidewalls of the mattress on her side of the bed began breaking down. We turned the mattress a few times over the following years but to Daisy it didn't seem to help much. 

Throughout all of this, I was perfectly fine with our bed. I didn't feel like we really needed a new bed -- it was comfortable enough for me. Before we'd gotten that bed we'd slept on a mattress quite literally from 1988, the year Daisy was born, a bed that I'd gotten third-hand at least and had used almost ever since I had moved out here from West Virginia. It had gone from Missouri to Kansas to Nebraska in every move I'd made, and I was not necessarily sad to see it go. That bed definitely needed replacing. But, the 2017 mattress that was barely six years old? Eh, I was fine with it.

Eventually Daisy's uncomfortability got to be too much for her and she declared that we needed to go buy a new bed because she couldn't sleep on it anymore without being in pain every day. So, I relented, and told her we could go look.

Do you folks have any idea what a new bed costs these days? Unless you've bought a bed very recently, I doubt that you do. You probably think you have a ballpark number in your head that's accurate, and I'm here to tell you that you're wrong. You're not close. You're not even in the ballpark and your favorite team has sold the franchise and left town. 

For starters, the low end mattresses now start around $1100. Start. That's not including box springs or frame, adjustable or otherwise. That is the starting price of a low-end, plain-jane mattress, made by some foreign company you've likely never heard of, but not a name-brand one. I say they start at $1100 because I saw zero mattresses priced lower than that in the store, and I was purposely looking for the cheapest one I could find so that I could come here and write about it later.

After two store visits and many beds we laid upon (in a non-biblical sense), we decided on a Purple mattress with an adjustable frame. It was the highest-end Purple mattress the store carried, firm, and an electric/remote controlled adjustable frame. Remember those old Craftmatic adjustable bed commercials from the 80s? Yeah, that's not a novelty anymore, or just for old people who can't get in or out of bed easily -- that's basically the norm now when you are looking to purchase a new bed. You don't have to get an adjustable frame, but most people buying new beds these days will do so. This wasn't a thing a decade ago -- hell, it wasn't a thing six years ago when we bought the last bed. The Purple also came with two pillows made of the same material -- pillows that were normally about $150 each -- because we were making our purchase during some "pre-Labor Day" sale or something.

The final cost of the entire new bed setup -- over $6,000. I wish I were making that up. I'm not. I'm very much not. 

But whatever Daisy wants, Daisy gets.

To be fair, it is very likely the best bed I've ever slept in. When you lay in it, it almost feels like it grabs you, supports you, and you sink into it as it wraps its big purple arms around you. I no longer have any back pain, and most of my joint pain is gone. I sleep harder and more deeply in this bed than I think I've ever slept in any other bed, as does Daisy. It took her some time to get used to it, but when she can go to bed on a weeknight after I've started work, and I hear her snoring within ten minutes, she is sleeping well and sleeping hard. So overall, we're very happy with it.

The same night we purchased the bed, we ventured over to the other side of the building to look at dishwashers.

Our old dishwasher came with the house, and it was not awful -- I will stress that -- but it was old. It did occasionally leak all over the kitchen floor due to a sometimes faulty door seal, and the plastic buttons on it were getting crushed in -- crushed in to the point where you really had to press on them hard to get them to work. Adding to that, the dish racks were cheaply-plastic-coated metal, and over the years the coating had worn off in many places, the tines had broken or bent (they were just, well, iron underneath I guess), and the tines that were not breaking had begun rusting away to nothing. New racks for the dishwasher were something like $400 by themselves (we looked them up) and given the age and the other problems with the leaking and the buttons, we just wanted to rip it out and get a new one put in that wouldn't have those problems.

Because I'd let her take the lead on the bed problem, Daisy gave me full reign to pick out the replacement dishwasher. Her only request was that we not get the cheapest one available and end up having the same problems in a few years. Well, you don't have to worry about that with me, because when I'm in charge of getting something I want to last, I spare no real expense. 

The cheapest dishwashers in stock were about $300. They were small, mostly plastic, and looked very cheap. I, instead, picked out the $1,400 KitchenAid stainless steel model, with three layers of  non-rusting racks, multiple cycles to choose from, multiple high-pressure sprayers, a high-heat dry option, a "scour/heavy wash" option, and a door that may as well be a hermetic seal. It was installed four days later (while I was asleep one day and Daisy was working from home), in less than an hour, and the old one was hauled away. It has worked flawlessly ever since, and I can't remember ever seeing cleaner dishes in my life. 

Knowing our luck, our refrigerator will be the next thing to die.

Anyway.

While I believe Daisy actually lost weight during our trip to see my parents, it was almost impossible for me to not eat like an asshole while I was down there, and thus when I returned, I'd gained nine pounds. I do not exactly know how that happens; I did eat some healthy meals when we were down there, but I also don't know that I ate nine pounds of food total during the week. I don't know that or if the food I eat during any given week at home physically weighs nine pounds either. As soon as I got home and got back on my normal sleep/work/eating schedule, I immediately dropped five pounds. Almost two months later, I'm still working to get back down to my pre-trip weight and continue losing, if I can. I'm about twenty-five pounds away from my first real goal weight.

I'm still injecting myself once a week with the Trulicity, with varying degrees of pain when doing so. I did my weekly injection yesterday and I barely felt it at all, but other times it hurts like hell for the 2-3 seconds that it's happening. Nerve clusters, I guess?

When I started writing this story, in the previous 48 hours I had been stuck with various needles six times -- I had my every-three-months blood draw appointment, and they had to stick me three times in order to get blood out of me. Then, the next morning I did the Trulicity, and that afternoon I got this year's flu shot and the new Covid booster. 

I am about done with being stuck by needles for the time being. I have no desire to get any more shots any time soon.

I didn't have any issues or sicknesses with this year's Covid booster, and my arm is only slightly sore where they stuck me. However, on the other arm -- where they administered the flu shot -- was so tender that it hurt without me doing anything to it, and moving the arm or flexing the muscles in the arm ached like hell. It didn't swell up into a big welt or anything (as it has, at times, been known to do in the past). Daisy noted that she experienced much the same effect. 

My bloodwork, by the way, was surprisingly great -- my A1C dropped a point and a half, and everything else was in normal ranges for the first time in ages. The doctors cleared me to go back to once-every-three-months check-ins. My guess is that if it remains really good when I go back around the new year, I'll drop back to once every six months again. 

I will pause for a minute and say I don't know how this happened, as I've basically been eating like an asshole for half or two-thirds of my meals, but I guess the Trulicity actually works. 

Speaking of work -- almost as soon as I arrived home from the Carolinas, I got a new work computer in the mail.

This requires a little bit of backstory and some explanation. When we all went work from home in 2020, we left our computers on our desks in the office and were issued VPN logins -- we would login to our desktop computers from home and would be able to work normally. The specifics of this changed a few times. Three months in, our company lost the lease to the building, and we went to site (masked up, on certain timeframes to minimize any Covid exposure) and picked up our machines to physically bring them home. We were issued a different VPN that was installed on our machines via network before we brought them home, and once we got them home we logged into that and it allowed us to access client tools. Fair enough, right?

That VPN got hacked in May 2022 by evildoers, and we switched to another one. Then they changed the login/authentication method to the new one at least twice -- to two different methods we need to use any time we login to our work PCs, both of them requiring your cell phone to be working and in your hand (and both of them will seriously fuck up if you get a new cell phone and don't know how to transfer/reset it up). This frustrated a lot of people, given the fact that all of the actual computers were almost a decade old -- some of them were older -- and they didn't mesh that well with the new VPN/authentication methods. There were lots of login issues, dropped connections, etc.

And if it wasn't that, the machines themselves were beginning to fail across the board, one or two at a time every week or two. 

We still had a hub office here in town, as did our sister site in El Paso. Our teams operated remotely from that building (all of our servers were there, and there were some skeleton-crew teams onsite during the pandemic as well as afterward). If one of our computers failed or were in its last gasps of life, we opened a replacement ticket and shot an email over to the IT leadership, and they imaged one of the computers in their warehouse with the tools we needed and left it at the security desk. We'd take in the old tower, swap it out for the new one, and go home. We have roaming profiles and all of our files are backed up by OneDrive, so anyone who knows what they're doing would have no issue plugging in the new machine, logging in, and resuming work as normal. I had to do this once when the computer I'd brought home from the office blew a fan and it sounded like a jet engine ready to take off. The replacement they gave me was manufactured in 2014, but it worked really well and to this day was my favorite work computer I've ever had.

This is how things went for some time, until we were informed around this time last year that they'd no longer be doing swaps onsite (the El Paso building closed down around this time, so they likely made it a blanket policy for our site up here as well). Instead, when we opened a machine replacement ticket, it would be sent to a third party company who would load the profile onto a new machine and then ship it to us via UPS. In turn, once we got the new machine and set it up, we took the old one to the local UPS store, gave them a code and our employee ID, and it was shipped back to the company. I had numerous agents on my team who had to do this process -- some of them multiple times because the company would keep sending them machines that either weren't configured properly or were faulty/failed within a few weeks. I didn't have a lot of high hopes or faith in this company after seeing that happen multiple times.

In June, it was announced that our last remaining hub building here in Omaha would be closing down in July, making everyone who worked there 100% permanent work-from-home employees. I covered this before here at length. However, what they didn't tell our teams (and wouldn't have, had I not asked about it a month or so later) was that all of our IT help here in town -- the guys I worked with a lot and had a good working relationship with, the ones who saved our asses many times in crisis scenarios when all of our systems went down, or who had the admin access to fix a program issue that was small, but crucial, on one of our machines when we needed it the most -- were all summarily shitcanned without warning. Our best IT tech was on vacation, and the day he returned he was told to pack it in and get the fuck out. From all accounts he was not happy about it.

IT support for our company was then transferred to a 24/7 team in the Philippines that we'd access via the help desk chat. Our teams began calling it the "No Help" desk, because their teams would either a.) blame the issue we were reporting on "user error," b.) tell you to reboot your PC and/or change your password, c.) claim that the team who could help would not be back in the office for 12 hours, d.) had the IQ of a glass of water, e.) would push back on the simplest requests, or f.) all of the above. 

So, we -- and I'm using the collective "we" here, meaning the vast majority of our entire program -- hated having to deal with these people and would frequently work with our one remaining program OPS specialist who hadn't been shitcanned (which I am very grateful for) to get the minor things taken care of. He and I became fast friends over the course of a few months.

In the early spring, we were asked to get all of the computer IDs and mailing addresses for our agents so that we could get their new computers ordered and shipped out to them -- the company had finally decided that machines a decade or more old were no longer gonna cut it, especially when we were all at home, so they were just going to do a blanket sweep/replacement of all old machines. We were told this would take place for both sites and that we should expect it to all be complete by May. I told them I didn't need a new machine, as I'd just had mine replaced less than a year before and it worked wonderfully. Tough, they replied, in a more professional way, you're getting one anyway. 

May came and went. No new machines.

June, July, and August came and went. No new machines.

By the week I was on vacation (so, Labor Day) -- out of the blue, my team began getting emails with tracking numbers for their new computers. No warning, no heads up, just "oh, your new PC is on its way, and it'll be there tomorrow. Make sure you're home and/or awake to sign for it and when you get it, make sure you set it up with our IT folks ASAP during your next shift, because if the old one isn't shipped back to us within three business days -- with tracking -- you'll be docked $540 out of your next paycheck."

I wish I were making that up.

A reminder here that $540 is laughable for those old machines. My desktop that I'm typing this on I purchased in 2021 as a fully-assembled, ready-to-go refurbished machine with Windows 10, a DVD-RW drive and a 2TB HDD, Intel Core I5 vPro and 16GB RAM for less than two hundred dollars. Most of the machines that were getting shipped back were many years older and far lower power than that, virtually useless hardware of questionable quality/specs that wouldn't even be useful in most business applications or deployments today, and would end up being parts machines at best. There's a reason -- multiple reasons -- many of them catastrophically failed for my agents over the years.

I was close to begging the IT guy to not replace my perfectly good machine that worked wonderfully and needed zero changes or upgrades to it, until he told me the truth behind it all -- because our building here in Omaha closed, we would no longer have our local server to operate from and/or VPN into. Instead we'd need to be switched to our company's corporate server, which required a completely different network mapping/login system -- one that apparently could not be network-installed on an older computer after the fact, but had to be built into the profile at install (I know how computers work, so I still think this is absolute bullshit -- but whatever, that's what you get when you fire your IT teams and offshore your support to the Philippines). 

The El Paso teams had already been using that system for some time, since the last network upgrade, and they weren't getting new computers because (secretly) most/all of them were "going away," except our After Hours teams, by the end of the year anyhow. I'll let you read between the lines as to what they meant by that, but I think it's pretty obvious. 

Now, here's the other thing they didn't want to tell anyone before the new computers were shipped -- the new machines were locked down like a bank vault. Meaning the normal user couldn't do hardly anything on them but work tasks. 90% of the internet was blocked from them, you can't save files to the desktop or hard drive, you can't have fucking bookmarks/favorites, you can't even pin a program to the goddamn taskbar. And that included manager-level machines too, like mine. 

You're fucking kidding me, right?

I get blocking some, or even most, websites -- that is understandable in a business sense, at least -- can't have folks reading reddit all day or scrolling Facebook (which, hilariously enough, is not locked down on these machines, because corporate has a social media team who updates all their accounts). But not being able to save files, or have bookmarks, or pin anything to the taskbar? That's taking security way too far. As a manager I have need for all of those things, the least of which being a giant folder full of documents that I saved over the years for managerial purposes -- a digital filing cabinet. I've worked there for almost a decade -- I have accrued/acquired a LOT of items that benefit me or the team during normal daily life running the show on 3rd shift. 

Luckily, fate shined a loving gaze upon me once again -- my IT guy friend heard my complaints and took control of my own computer replacement personally, making sure it had installed on it the same expanded profile/accesses he had on his own machine. In doing so, the machine that was shipped to me was even less locked down in many key areas than my old one had been, and where it is not I experience minimal security issues (instead of like, 90% of the web being blocked, it's like 15-20% at most). I can save items to my desktop or anywhere else. I have all of my bookmarks. I have everything I need pinned to the taskbar. Functionally it is 98% exactly like my old PC, except lightning fast because it's much newer. 

I was told never to mention that I have the accesses and abilities I do. If I'm asked I can use the statement "I can do that because I have a manager profile" or something like that, and leave it at that.

This is likely the best stopping point for the moment, but yes, there is a part II coming, so stay tuned....

Brandon and Daisy Visit The Carolinas, Part II: That Palm Tree Lifestyle

 When we last left our intrepid heroes...

I will preface this by saying that a few days before we made our trip, Hurricane Idalia almost ruined it. 

Idalia fired up in the Atlantic about a week before we were to leave Omaha, and in the span of a short few days it got big and powerful, and appeared that it would be taking aim almost directly for where my parents live on Oak Island.

This is not a new phenomenon for my parents or for the island itself -- there is a reason that almost every house down there is built on very sturdy stilts, especially the ones within a few miles from the beach. Now, mind you, my parents are on an island, so everything is within a few miles from the beach -- it's not a large island (19.9 square miles, according to Wikipedia). Additionally, the island's populace is about 97% rich old white people with sports cars or giant bro-dozer trucks. So, there's money there, and they protect their property. I lost count of how many douchey Mustangs, or white-haired old men in Mazda MX-5 Miatas I saw on the first day alone.

Anyway. On the Monday before we left, Idalia made a slight turn in the Atlantic and in doing so, it did not/would not directly hit my parents, only skirt the coast. What my parents did get was some hard rain, fairly high winds, and a tornado warning in the county -- which apparently tore the roof off the local animal shelter about two miles from their house (we didn't see this, we were only told later). My parents didn't lose power, because -- conveniently -- all of the power lines to the island are all underground. Probably because of scenarios like this. They were fine, and the storm passed and moved out to sea without major incident for them two full days before we arrived. When we got there, it was dark, so we wouldn't have been able to see damage anyhow in the night. When we were finally able to experience the island in the daylight over the course of the week, the only way we could tell that a storm had rolled through was some remnants of storm surge and a bit of flooding in the more "coastal" areas really close to the beach. We never actually saw the animal shelter, and for the most part, anyone who hadn't been there would never have known that a hurricane had just rolled through.

Sunday morning, we woke up and I went outside onto the front porch -- the house has two giant wooden decks, one on the front of the house and one on the back, and both are screened in to keep out bugs. And the first thing I noticed was palm trees. Everywhere. Palm trees that we couldn't see when we were driving down there in the night, and palm trees we didn't see in Raleigh (though I did notice, on the way back through Raleigh at the end of the week, that they had a few here and there as well). 

I will say that my parents were very happy we were there -- they've been trying to get us to come visit them in NC for many years. They've owned the house for eight years and change, so they had it when we last visited home in 2016, to WV, but they had not at that juncture made it their primary residence. Well, in the time since, they have, and my parents are likely selling the house in WV sooner rather than later (though they've been saying they were going to do that for years). I can't stress enough how wonderful the beach house is. For starters, it's gigantic -- it's likely larger than our own home here in Omaha and is laid out in a very logical manner. Doors on each end of the top floor that each lead out onto their respective decks, a kitchen/dining area on one side of the floor and a living room on the other, and linking them together on the sides, four bedrooms and two bathrooms -- one bathroom and two bedrooms on each side. To the left of the kitchen was the master bedroom and what used to be a kids' room, and on the right was my mother's storage room/closet and the "guest" room, which would serve as our bedroom while we were there. The master was quite large, and the other three bedrooms were fairly small.

Downstairs (read: under the actual house, under the stilts) there is a carport area for two cars, an outdoor shower (I mean, it is the beach), and an outdoor sort of storage area/basement area that my dad uses as a workbench/work-room as well as his recording studio. Behind the house is a beautiful, flat backyard with pine trees on each side of it. 

ALL of the furniture, appliances, and about 95% of the decor came with the house when they bought it. Including the beds, tables, couches, etc. In the "kids" room there are two sets of bunk beds, one on each side of the room, presumably because the house's last owners had kids or grandkids who would stay with them frequently. It's all still there; my parents had no reason to move it or get rid of it. Most of the stuff in the house appliance-wise is in full working order to this day, though some of it has its quirks -- the stove has a burner on it that doesn't really work properly, the washer and dryer are finicky (so said my mother, but I found them to work perfectly fine and lightning fast), the downstairs outdoor shower doesn't work well, etc. The house is about fifteen years old give or take, all new construction. 

My parents' street is lined with very similar houses on both sides, and it's the sort of neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else, and all parties are extremely social. That sort of environment is my personal definition of hell -- if I move to a beach house in a coastal neighborhood, ever, it's because I want to be left alone and to get away from society by moving to the beach. This is, of course, my eventual plan: to own a house by the sea, filled with cats, and with Daisy by my side -- and to have the rest of the world leave us the fuck alone. 

My parents no longer have cats. The last one died about two months ago, and even he lived in WV at the WV house. What my parents do have are two dogs and a stray parrot.

Yes, a parrot.

A little less than a decade ago in WV, when my parents first got their golden retriever, my Dad had her out in the yard when she ran off and came back with a live parrot in her mouth (she is a bird dog, after all). I'm glossing over some details here for brevity's sake, but it's an actual parrot. A small one, about the size of a robin, but a parrot. Nobody knew where the parrot had come from -- my parents' house in WV is in a very rural area several miles from the closest "town," twenty-ish miles from the closet major city (Morgantown) and about fifteen miles from the county seat "city" of Kingwood, where I went to high school. They're in the middle of nowhere, and my parents' dog found and caught, without killing it, a parrot in their back yard.

My dad put up flyers and online posts trying to find the owner and luckily, my parents had an old birdcage they'd gotten at an antique sale/auction at some point so that they could keep him safely in it. Nobody responded to the "lost parrot" ads/flyers, and it had a band on its leg that had a number on it. My dad tracked that number to last being registered in a pet store in Chicago.

Chicago is 547 miles away from my parents' house in WV. 

I'm sure I've likely told this story before in previous posts here, of course, but the sheer oddity of it bears repeating.

So ever since then, my parents have had a parrot. They know the breed of it and told me what it is at one point, but I can't remember. It's not like the giant tropical parrot, but a little green bird.

[EDIT]: I looked it up, and he's a green-cheeked conure, one of these:

The parrot talks sometimes, and I've heard it say words or phrases on occasion, but it mostly just squawks and screeches, and will not speak on command no matter how hard you try to get it to do so. He is also a bitey little bastard with a mean temperament, and yells every time he sees my dad (who does, of course, give him the most love and food).

I asked my mother if they ever thought to try to teach it anything interesting, like racial slurs (I will stress that this was a joke) and my mother was horrified at such a suggestion.

They never really gave the bird a name. My dad calls him "Bug." My mother calls him "Turd." So there you go. He doesn't really respond to either one anyway. He also passes out sometimes while still on his perch, laying down and looking dead like a canary in a coal mine, which is...a sight to see, to be sure. 

The average lifespan of green-cheeked conures is 10-25 years, with some pet conures living up to 30 years. They have no idea how old he was when the dog found him. He could die in another year or two or he could outlive both of my parents (realistically speaking, of course, not to be morbid). I will also state that I am not a fan of this bird because he's a loud little asshole, and every time I visit home I find myself telling him to shut the fuck up or just silently give him the finger if he starts going off when I walk through the room. 

My parents' dogs are far more tolerable than the bird.

Now, mind you, I grew up in the house in WV with dogs. There's not been a time since 1994 or so where either/both of my parents didn't have a dog -- the cats came much later, with most of them (at one time, they had three indoor-outdoor cats, and later halfway adopted a pack of five or six strays that were, to my knowledge, outdoor-only). When I moved to the midwest in 2006, my parents had a very elderly shepherd mix who was going blind and was mostly deaf, an eight-year-old shih-tzu who was supposed to be my dog but who quickly became my mother's, and an indoor-outdoor elderly cat who had shown up on our doorstep a few years before I moved out, in the middle of a snowstorm, so we took her in and made her ours. She also became my mother's cat over time -- and my mother used to hate cats.

There's a heated debate to this day who was the first person to let that cat into the house.

The shepherd would die about two years after I moved out, the shih-tzu died about ten years ago of old age, and the elderly cat would hang in there for years upon years afterwards before succumbing to old age herself -- our estimated guess was that she had to be at least twenty years old. In the interim times my parents would bring in two other stray cats -- one of them a big orange tom, and the other a seal-point Himalayan/Siamese male, as well as get two more dogs: the golden retriever and another shih-tzu. What I'm saying is that my parents, at one point, had three indoor-outdoor cats, two dogs, a parrot, and would later have a family of even more cats show up that they were also taking care of. That's a farm full of pets, folks. That's a lot of animals. 

When Daisy and I last visited home to WV in 2016, they had all three cats, the parrot, the two dogs and hadn't acquired the second cat family yet (I should ask questions about that, as I don't know where they went or what happened to them, only that they're not there anymore). In the time since, all three of those cats have died, with the last one being the big orange tomcat -- about a month before we flew down to NC. At that point my parents made the declaration that they were "done with cats." The last survivor who died shortly before our visit was exclusively a WV cat and never went down to NC (actually I don't think any of them ever went down there), and he was taken care of by the neighbors while my parents lived in the beach house. When my dad last went up there earlier this summer, he was in pretty bad shape and the vet said he was riddled with tumors, so my dad (sadly) knew he had to ease him into the next life via ye olde sleeping injection. It's an inevitability for my own cats that I know is eventually coming, likely, that I don't really want to think about any more than necessary.

So, in NC, my parents have the golden retriever, the shih-tzu, and the asshole parrot. And the dogs love us. The golden retriever -- the dog I always wanted as a child but never had -- is old now, weighs 129 pounds (and she's lost weight from the 150ish she used to be), is physically larger than my mother and looks like a bear. She wants constant attention and love from anyone and everyone, and is rambunctious and loud if she doesn't get it. The shih-tzu adores me, has more than a passing physical resemblance to the last shih-tzu they had, and is the sweetest little dog ever. He's a lap dog, he likes to play, he listens to commands, and he's a sweet little lovey boy. His personality is also almost a complete 180 from the last one, who was (like the bird) a little asshole. This dog is fun. He's a good dog. He remembered me and Daisy and he absolutely wanted all the love he could get from me/us, as well as wanted to play a lot.

These dogs follow my parents everywhere around the house, constantly. If one of the parents goes out onto one of the porches, they follow. If they go to the bathroom, they follow. If they're in bed or in the kitchen, so are the dogs. 

Well, not the golden retriever, as she's so giant she doesn't get into bed with the parents -- she has a pattern of sleeping like a rock on the floor of the parents' bathroom, and once she's out, she's out -- when I would wake up early most mornings to make coffee and go out onto the back porch to read and vape, she would occasionally glance up at me when I passed between rooms, register (you could almost see the wheels turning) who I was, and then ease back into sleep.

Side note, my parents must sleep really deep/hard, because it is not quiet to go in and out of the back door, nor is their Alexa (which controls a good chunk of the lighting around the house) quiet when you give her commands to turn on/off lights and fans. If I ever disturbed them, they never told me. 

Anyway.

That is how most of the time went during our trip. We'd get up in the mornings, have a light-ish breakfast, figure out what or if we were going to do anything for the day, go do it, come back home, chill with the parents and have dinner, and then go back to bed. Some days we didn't really go anywhere or do anything, other days we went out and did a bunch of things around the area. I'm not going to bore you with all of the miniscule details of our daily activities, but I will give a brief bullet point list of things we did:

• Went to the local farmer's market with the parents, where Daisy got some local art and shaved italian ice (which was wonderful), and I bought a funnel cake and ate it -- the first funnel cake I've had in close to twenty years.
• Did some grocery shopping and Walmarting around the area, where we found that the local Walmart was meh at best, and for all of the praise people give Publix, found that it's just a pretty average grocery store. Daisy did find a cute dress at the Walmart though, and everywhere down there sells Utz chips, so those are pluses. 

As an aside, Food Lion is a big chain in NC; I don't know if they're based in the Carolinas or what, but there were at least three of them between where we were in NC and SC while we were there. We didn't go to any of them (no need, really). 

• Visited the beach three times -- once with both parents, after the farmer's market (to an overlook dock; we didn't go down on the sand that time), and twice on our own. The morning we left, Daisy got up early and took the Spaceship Van to the beach by herself to get some sun and get into the water one last time before heading home. 
• One of those beach trips I got to see a giant lighthouse, though I didn't get to go up in it. Daisy took pictures.
• Went to two different beach/souvenir shops, the touristy shops, where (and I'm only a little ashamed to say this) I spent well over $400 on various items -- including many t-shirts/tank-tops, two pairs of sandals, a hoodie, a skull-and-crossbones beach towel, keychains made from actual bullets (one went to my dad, the other went to Daisy's), a floppy sun hat, a swimsuit top for Daisy, salt-water taffy, and I'm sure some other little things I'm forgetting. 
• Drove down to North Myrtle Beach one afternoon and went to the Alligator Adventure park, where I finally fulfilled my dream of seeing gators. Lots of gators. Hundreds, if not thousands, of gators:

Unfortunately, as cool as they were and as many design options as they had, the Alligator Adventure park did not have t-shirts in fat guy sizes, so I couldn't come back with one.

• Had dinner at the Mellow Mushroom pizza place in North Myrtle Beach, which Daisy and I both deemed as "meh, passable" but not great (but my parents loved the leftovers).
• We did not go to the mainline Myrtle Beach or visit the Grand Strand or any of that, though if we'd left the house earlier in the day there would likely have been the opportunity to do so. Even driving down to North Myrtle Beach from Oak Island was about a 80 minute trip, roughly. It's close, but not incredibly close.
• We got to experience the sheer luxury of my mother's Lexus not once, but multiple times as passengers.
• We found a new type of vegan sandwich meat (Unreal Deli) in the Publix, and as much as I love the company's peppered "turkey" and "roast beef" it has now given me the screaming shits like three times, so I've learned that it must be enjoyed in moderation at best. This did not stop us from bringing multiple packs of it home, where it has sat in the refrigerator downstairs since we got back and I have been eating through it very slowly.

The rest of the time we were there was mainly spent with the parents as leisurely as possible. My dad is retired, and has been for a while, so he is always around the house taking care of the house, and my mother and the dogs, as needed. My mother retired a few years ago, but eventually went back to work at the local community college down there -- a job that she says she really loves and enjoys. She had taken the week off work while we were there, so she was also around the house full time. 

Here's the thing about my parents, and it's multifaceted -- they deeply love both me and Daisy. They lovingly accepted Daisy into their lives when we got together and later married, and I mean, I'm their son, so they love me as well of course. My dad has always been a wonderful man, and I think in the 30+ years he and my mother have been together, I've only ever had one or two mild arguments with him, back in my teenage years (never as an adult). 

My mother and I, however, have had a much more tempestuous relationship over the years, which has gone from very sweet and loving at best to very bitter, critical, and angry at worst. I'd say it's not always been wine and roses but for my mother at least there is always wine, and therein lies the problem -- without going into too much unnecessary detail.

I do love my mother. I love my mother very much -- she raised me as a single parent for years, making many sacrifices along the way so that I could have as normal of a childhood as possible. She mostly succeeded at that, and where she didn't it wasn't necessarily her fault. That being said, and being completely honest about it, there are many things I do not love about my mother -- either through nature (read: genetically) or through nurture (read: my upbringing/formative years) -- that I recognize in myself even to this day. And while many of these traits I've tried to fight or downplay/overcome in one instance or another, this trip made it very clear to me -- as a fully grown adult man in his forties -- that I am absolutely my mother's son. 

"Every single one of my neuroses," I told Daisy when we were alone in the van driving somewhere, "and I do mean every single one of them, all come from that woman."

Try as I might, a lot of it I can't fight.

But.

Over the years I have become more immune and battle hardened to a lot of my mother's...shall we say... quirks. Yeah, let's go with that. It's likely the nicest way I can put it. So I have the equivalent of my "shields up" most of the time when we're around her. 

If only.

So, when my mother approaches both of us about our weight -- both together and then separately, multiple times throughout the trip, and even after it has been made very clear to her that I have lost more than 50 pounds since she last saw me, am taking care of my diabetes and staying active, and that the foods she sees me eat on vacation are just that, vacation foods and not my normal diet  and she keeps harping on it more and more...it's time to not be nice. 

This is just one of multiple things.

There was a solid chunk of time over the trip where I would just go into the bedroom and take a nap or go outside on the porch, or tell Daisy (occasionally) that we needed to go somewhere and do something, or either I needed to be unconscious or my mother needed to be, because I just couldn't deal with her at the time. I felt like I was fifteen again and living at home. I just couldn't do it. I felt like that picture of Ben Affleck.

That's right, you know the one.

To be fair, it was not always like this during our trip. Even when it was, I know my mother's heart is in the right place and her words/actions come from a place of love. I get that, I acknowledged it with her. But I also told her in no uncertain terms that the critiques -- whatever they were about at any given time, whether it was my weight, Daisy's weight, or something else -- were to be stopped and dropped. Completely. And, to her credit, she complied.

In the more quiet times, when she and I were alone, she told me that she really liked my tattoos, and told me how much she missed me and loved me. She also told me how much she adored Daisy, and told Daisy on the side how patient and kind I was, how I was a good man just like my dad.

"Well, I mean, the man did practically raise me from age ten onward," I told Daisy. And he did. Much of my personality, my sense of humor, and my likes/dislikes can all be traced back to that man. 

He gave me who I am, and my mother gave me the neuroses I have. So, even trade? I guess?

In a long conversation alone with Daisy, she also gave her the rundown of our "family history," I suppose, involving letting Daisy hear my mother's side of the story of her marriage to my father, their divorce, my father's abandonment of me, her marriage to my abusive former stepfather and later divorce from him, to meeting my dad 30 years ago and basically starting her life over with him -- when she was half the age she is now (and was younger than I am now by a substantial amount).

Daisy went on to tell me that she'd told her I'd had a rough, traumatic childhood with a lot of pain and a lot of upheaval, with very little stability. And while this is somewhat true, it's mostly a dramatized version of the truth. Yeah, part of my younger years were pretty fucked up, but by the time I was in middle school (so, mid-90s at the latest) my life had stabilized and I was, well, pretty normal. Normal for me, anyway. I had to correct some minor info here and there from what she told Daisy, but most of the specifics were there. I also likely think my mother downplayed how hard her own life had been as well. 

But this was far from the most interesting conversation we had with my parents when we were there, because as they are now senior citizens and are, of course, not getting any younger, the inevitable conversation about their eventual deaths had to happen. My mother informed us that she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered in the ocean (which, amusingly enough, is what I'd like to happen to me as well). She wants it to be done as quickly and cheaply as possible, without any real fanfare. I did not ask her if I get the Lexus -- it would have been in exceedingly poor taste and while amusing, likely only amusing to me. My mother did tell Daisy on the side that when she left this planet, I wouldn't have to worry about money -- which I find interesting because my parents are not exceedingly well off. It is what it is. It's not like I'm planning to retire on my inheritance or anything like that, because there really isn't one -- but I guess there's life insurance and the like? Okay, that makes sense. 

My mind wandered back to one time when my mother called me in the middle of the day a few years ago to ask/confirm my social security number with her, so I could be listed as the beneficiary of something or other. I confirmed it with her and she no doubt listed me on any number of different things afterwards, something I'll probably have to deal with in another decade or so (conservative estimate). 

As the week began to wind down, we were beginning to get more and more tired and in pain from all the activity. Daisy had been fighting off back and foot pain all week, and I'd gotten to the point where no matter how hard the bed was (and it was very firm/old in that room) I would pass out and be dead to the world for many hours at a time and then wake up sore and stiff until I moved around enough again for the day -- once more restarting/continuing the cycle. Add to this that every day we were there, our allergies were horrifying (we aren't exactly used to a southern beach climate with a lot of palm and pine trees) and the temperatures, every day, were in the mid-to-high 90s. 

On our last day there -- Thursday, the 7th -- we said our goodbyes and drove the Spaceship Van back up to Raleigh, where we once more ate at the Pure Vegan Cafe -- I was smart this time and ordered the breakfast burger for myself. I don't even remember what Daisy got, but I know she put half of it in her backpack and took it with her, because when we went through security at the airport that afternoon, she was randomly pulled aside for additional screening and the TSA guy there (who looked like he was seventeen) pulled it out, opened it up, made a face, and put it back in her bag.

We dropped off the Spaceship Van (and were sad to see it go), got on/off our flights without incident, and around midnight that night we were wheels down in Omaha and took an Uber back home. Our cats were delighted to see us -- Pete and Hank were very vocal about that, and we got ready for bed. 

It was at that point the most amusing thing happened of the whole vacation -- after we got home.

Daisy showered and went to bed first. I stayed up a bit and used my computer for a while, until Pete began wailing loudly and tried to break down my office door. I finally left the room and went into the bedroom, where Pete and Hank immediately joined us in bed. Then Sadie came up and happily got her spot. A few minutes later, we felt another whump on the bed, and Daisy turned on the light on her phone to find Maggie crawling up between us. Yes, Maggie, the geriatric downstairs cat who almost never goes upstairs (it's hard on her body, and she's slowly dying of kidney failure), missed us so much that she climbed the stairs, got up on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, and jumped up onto the bed with us to snuggle in between us.

So it was all four cats, plus us, in the bed that night. I think they missed us.

When we both awakened the next morning, Maggie was still in there with us, though she had moved to the floor next to Hank's cat tree, likely to keep an eye on us so we wouldn't leave again. 

And that's the story of our trip. I'd return to work the following Sunday night, and Daisy would return on the following Monday morning. We've slowly gotten back into the normal groove of things since then, though I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the Carolinas -- the climate, the atmosphere, being able to sit on the back porch at night and hear the ocean, and not really having any responsibilities or duties to have to worry about for the time we were there. I miss my parents too, of course. This is likely the last real trip we'll take this year, too, as it gets colder and we buckle down for the snow and ice of the coming winter months. 

I will, of course, miss the Spaceship Van too.

Brandon and Daisy Visit The Carolinas, Part I

We have gone to, and returned safely from, the Carolinas (mostly North Carolina), visiting my parents.

It was a very fun, if sometimes exhausting, trip. 

This is the story of that trip. There's not a large amount to tell, honestly, but I do have some things I'd like to cover and share here. Before I do, though, let's start with the basic bullet points:

• The cats were fine while we were away. Daisy's parents came over to the house every day (or nearly every day) to make sure they had food, water, clean litter, and love. From all accounts, Sadie hid every time they came over and Hank was so starved for love and affection that he wouldn't leave them alone. 
• I spent close to $400 on souvenirs, including t-shirts, a hoodie, a (purely utilitarian) sun hat, keychains, salt-water taffy, new sandals, tank tops, a skull-and-crossbones beach towel, and some other little odds and ends. 
• Between the two of us, we took hundreds of pictures (most of which have already been shared online at this point). 
• I saw and experienced incredible amounts of wildlife, both native/in the wild and in an animal sanctuary -- we'll get to this.
• We spent time in the ocean and collected more sand than you could possibly imagine in every crevice of our bodies as well as in all of our clothing/vehicles.
• We have become van people and may actually buy a van.
• We ate wonderful vegan food while we were visiting and Daisy even cooked some of her own for us/the parents.
• The parents' dogs adore us.

All of this and more, of course.

So let's start the story -- and that story begins on the Friday night before Labor Day, which was the first of the month. 

I mentioned here in passing, far earlier in these entries, that we'd bought and paid for this trip well in advance. I can't recall how far in advance, but it was either right before or right after our trip to Nova Scotia in May. That included the flights, the booking of the rental car, planning the actual itinerary, and making sure everything was bought and paid for -- locked in, PTO submitted for both of us as early as we possibly could do so, etc. We'd fly out very early on the morning of the 2nd, would arrive in NC by shortly after noon, pick up the rental car at the airport, stop in Raleigh (where we were flying into) for lunch, and be at my parents' place in Oak Island by nightfall -- or, at least, hopefully before the WVU football season opener vs. Penn State started, as it was an evening game and nationally televised. 

Hah. HAH. That is not how it happened.

The initial few hours of our travel were fine. I booked the Uber to pick us up and take us to the airport at something like 4am, 4:30, etc. Our flight to Atlanta was scheduled to lift off at 6:50. We figured that would give us enough time to get there, get through security, check our bags, and get to the gate -- and we were right. Daisy had checked us in online well before we left for the airport and had already paid for our checked baggage, so all we had to do was print out the tags from the kiosk, attach them, and let the desk workers do the rest. Our bags were both way underweight -- even with a giant box of probably 100+ comics for my dad inside my suitcase, it weighed only 28 pounds. After all, we were visiting my parents, who have a washer/dryer and we were only going to be there for five days and nights. It's still very much summer in the subtropics of the Carolinas -- you can pack light and dress light.

Now, mind you, I haven't been to either of the Carolinas in 30 years -- not for any length of time, anyway. I've flown through Charlotte's airport a few times over the past few years in other travels, and Charlotte is far from coastal Carolina weather/climate as they're quite far inland there. The last time I was down there, I went by car to Myrtle Beach with my mother and former stepfather in 1993. That was a fun enough trip, but it was very commercialized (staying in a beachfront hotel, doing touristy things, going to tourist-filled beaches, etc). I got the worst sunburn of my life on that trip, so if I ever get skin cancer in my later years I'll be able to blame it on Myrtle Beach in the 90s.

(Side note: I am wearing a Myrtle Beach t-shirt as I am writing this.)

There were fun parts to that trip, though. I remember making some friends at the hotel, finding a giant conch shell on the beach (my mother still owns this shell), eating a Bigfoot pizza from Pizza Hut, and staying inside after I got my sunburn watching Dinosaucers and Denver, The Last Dinosaur on the USA Cartoon Express.

It's funny the things you remember as an adult 30 years later.

Anyway, I knew this trip would not be like that one. For one, in those 30 years, Myrtle Beach has apparently gone crazy and become a lawless, gunfire-filled wasteland of a tourist-trap beach. I cannot independently verify this because Daisy and I only went as far as North Myrtle Beach, which is its own separate community (I'll get to this in a bit). I had mentioned to my parents that I wanted us to have a Myrtle Beach day while we were there, all four of us, as it's about an hour from their house. Neither of them wanted to do that -- too many people, too much crime, etc. Daisy and I made tentative plans to go down there for a few hours on one day we were there, but I told Daisy that if we didn't get to it, it was fine -- I wasn't visiting the area to see the sights, I was visiting to see my parents. 

For two, in those 30 years my mother met my "dad" after divorcing my former stepfather, had started a new life, bought three different homes (one on her own when it was just the two of us, and the other two, including the beach house, with my dad), had gone through numerous pets, jobs, and vehicles, and had retired to NC to live that beach life. And honestly, more power to my parents for being able to do that. Major props. It wasn't always easy and I remember times when money was quite tight, as well as many rough patches my parents went through together.

For three, I have become an adult -- and now an officially-middle-aged adult, at that -- over those 30 years. While there are still things that excite me about a beach vacation, souvenir shops and different foods/restaurants being but two of them, I am much more of a milder person at age 40 than I ever expected to be. Well, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't sure that I'd actually reach 40, so every day now is a blessing of sorts. As I've aged, I've learned to appreciate the simple things that money can't buy -- such as time with my aging parents and their dogs, time with my incredibly kind, patient, and loving wife, and just general rest/downtime when I can get it. We always think we're going to have more time than we do, and then when it comes down to it...we just don't. So, I try to savor and appreciate the little things in life that make us happy, that keep us going. That's what I wanted this trip to be, overall.

But, I'm getting far off track. 

So we got to the airport, got everything checked in, checked our luggage, and got to our gate. It was a fairly busy morning at the Omaha airport; we'd expected it to mostly be a ghost town, as it normally is for early morning flights, but it was not -- it was Labor Day weekend, of course, and people tend to travel over Labor Day as the last blast of the summer. Our flight was expected to be full. Not over-full, but still full. 

Boarding was supposed to begin around 6am. It did not. The plane was at the gate, everyone was there waiting to board the flight to Atlanta, and the doors remained closed. We sat there until about 6:40 or so before boarding started, and at that point it was already clear that we were going to be later than we expected getting into Atlanta.

We got into the plane, sat down and got situated, and the doors were closed. It was at that point where the pilot came over the intercom system and told us that the delay in boarding was because of a faulty engine part -- an air conditioner or something -- and that they luckily had a backup system and they had flown with one instead of two many times with no issue, so when we saw the mechanics outside the window working on the engine they were trying to disable the faulty system and we'd take off shortly.

We sat there at the gate for probably twenty more minutes before the pilot came on the intercom again and said that it could not be fixed at the moment, and the other unit had gone out too (or something), and that we'd need to get off the plane and take our stuff with us because -- while the flight had not yet been canceled -- we had a delay until at least 10am on our hands while they fixed the plane. The FAA had already been notified and they were working to get our connecting flights rescheduled for us in the background, for those of us who had connecting flights, and as soon as the work was finished, we'd re-board and get in the air towards Atlanta.

Okay, whatever. It was what it was. It caused some stress for me and Daisy, but shit happens. We begrudgingly grabbed our shit and got off the plane, and waited in the terminal at the gate for next steps. In the interim, Daisy had pulled out her phone and had found a replacement flight for us to take from Atlanta to Raleigh, because we would be missing the one we'd been set to board due to the delay. She waited to pull the trigger on booking it, though.

About half an hour after we were all shuffled off the plane, the pilot emerged from the jetway and let the staff at the counter know that work was complete, everything was fixed, and that they could start re-loading all of the luggage again and begin the boarding process. He did not tell this to the group of collected passengers -- we were just close enough to the front desk to hear everything he was saying to the desk crew. It was sometime around this point where Daisy pulled the trigger and booked the later flight in order to secure us spots on it. We'd be getting into Raleigh about two or three hours later than expected, but we'd get there -- and possibly still get to the parents' house before the WVU game started.

The boarding process began again from the beginning, which I thought was laughable because at this point, does it really matter what order/groups people were boarding on? Everyone would legit be going back to the exact same seats they'd left an hour previously. 

By shortly before 10am -- almost exactly three hours later than we were originally supposed to leave -- we were wheels up and in the air to Atlanta. In Atlanta we had to catch the subway (or whatever it is they call it, I have no idea) to our connecting flight's terminal, and then were able to get on the flight to Raleigh without incident. 

By the time we were on the ground in Raleigh, had picked up our luggage from the baggage claim, and made our way to the rental car place via shuttle, it was well after 2pm. We'd been traveling for about ten hours at that point, we were both running on two hours' sleep, and we still had a three-hour drive down to my parents' from Raleigh.

For those of you asking internally -- yes, we could have flown into Wilmington, NC -- which is a little less than an hour from my parents' house, and that was originally the plan. However, it doubled our plane ticket costs to fly into Wilmington vs. Raleigh, and we figured that putting the equivalent of an extra tank of gas into the rental car ($40 or so) and driving down from there would be far cheaper and easier than doubling our ticket costs, even if it were somewhat less convenient.

If I would've known the debacle that we'd have to deal with at the rental car place, I may have just gone fuck it, do it. 

So we get off the shuttle at the rental car area and...there is a line. There is a long line. It went out the door and around the front of the building, down the sidewalk next to the shuttle buses, and...it wasn't really moving.

Mind you, it's above 90 degrees, there's not a cloud in the sky, and it's humid AF. Daisy and I are both wearing all black -- I had on a pair of black shorts and a black High Spirits t-shirt, and Daisy had on a black tank and black shorts. And we were very hot and uncomfortable. 

The rental car place serviced three different rental car companies in one building -- Hertz, Dollar, and Budget (Enterprise and whatever others were on the other side of the lot). Our particular side of the building was Hertz and Dollar, in two separate lines. Dollar to the left of us, Hertz was to the right. 

Here I am, stuck in the middle with youuuu....

Ahem. Anyway.

It took half an hour or so in line before we were even inside the building (in air conditioning once more, thankfully) -- where we found that the line was going through those zig-zag style rope paths, and the line was about twice as long as we originally thought it was. We made friends with the people in line and graciously accepted bottles of water that the staff was bringing around to help all of the waiting customers cool down.

I wasn't concerned, really -- we'd booked our car months in advance, and had booked a full-size car at that. The rental agreement on Daisy's phone said "Chevy Malibu or similar." We'd had a Malibu on our trip to Nova Scotia last year and had really liked it -- it was a very capable car that got excellent gas mileage and we expected something similar. After all, the Malibu has been a staple of fleet/rental vehicles for over two decades now, and rental places buy them by the thousands. You can actually buy old rental cars directly from the rental companies really cheaply after they've been used for 2-3 years. 

After what seemed like forever (but was really about an hour or so), we finally got to the desk, where they went over Daisy's paperwork/reservation, and said something along the lines of "okay, you're good to go, cross the street out there to the 'gold' rental lot, pick a car, get in and drive off."

"Just...pick one?" we asked.

"Yep, doesn't matter which one, any in that lot are yours to choose from." 

This was surprising to us because we had never heard of this concept before. Just go pick a random car? Keys are in it? Hop in and drive off? Yep. That's exactly how they do it now.

So, Daisy and I wheeled our suitcases out to the "Gold" lot, to find...the exact same line we'd waited on inside, with all of the same people, and zero cars in the lot.

Well, I'll correct myself here. There weren't zero cars. There were zero actual gasoline-powered cars. There were two full rows of fully electric vehicles, including Teslas, just sitting there. Nobody wanted one because, I assume, they had no experience with them and/or were driving long distances and didn't know where they'd be able to charge them. 

After talking to the people who'd been in line in front of us, again, we found that the cars that we were supposed to be choosing from had all been very recently returned and their entire staff was out cleaning/washing them one by one and filling them with gas. They'd be bringing them back as they were available, one by one, as soon as they could. 

There were about thirty people in line -- some couples with children, some couples, some just single folks looking to get the car they'd already paid to rent. And all of them were pissed. 

It was around this point where Daisy began to laugh from frustration and exhaustion. I don't know if you have ever been in a scenario where you're so frustrated and tired that you have a brief psychotic break, but we were about at that point. We graciously accepted more bottles of water from the kind soul who had followed us all out to the lot in order to help try to keep us cool. However, some of the other rental customers were not being kind to this lady and were taking their frustrations out on her -- including a very gay businessman who was going full Karen on anyone who worked for the company within earshot, and who was on the phone trying to reach the corporate president as well. Like settle down, bro. It is what it is.

To be fair, some of the people in the line behind us did come out, hop into a Tesla or whatever, and drove off in their electric rental car. Those people either had experience with electric vehicles or didn't have far to go, I imagine. The rest of us formed up into a queue based on where we were in the line inside, and once cars started coming back to the lot, no matter what it was, the next people up got it.

This line outside lasted at least another hour, maybe ninety minutes. During this time cars would come in one by one. We were in the middle of the line, roughly. Some of the cars that came back were promising -- little Kia/Honda SUVs, some Subarus (Outback wagons and Foresters), Nissan Altimas, etc. I didn't see a single Malibu or anything like it -- well, I guess the Altimas were close enough there. One couple even got a new Prius when they were next up in line. 

Finally, we were up next, and the vehicle that would be ours pulled up....it was a minivan.

A 2023 Chrysler Pacifica, arctic white, with a full tank of gas and still dripping wet from the car wash.

Right behind it pulled in a few other vehicles all at the same time -- a nondescript sedan of some sort, a small SUV, and what looked to be a Chrysler 300. Daisy was less than thrilled.

"I don't really want a van," she said under her breath. "I want one of those." But there were other people in line who were already moving toward the other vehicles like sharks in blood-filled waters.

"Fuck it," I said, as I slid open the side door and hoisted in my suitcase, "more cargo room, put your shit in the van."

I must admit that my patience for all of this bullshit was really worn thin at this point.

So we got inside the van and...it was like a spaceship. Cabin room for days. Incredibly comfortable seats. Intelligently designed and engineered craftsmanship in and out. Amazing visibility. Easy-to-use basic control panels. Adjustable everything. Whisper-quiet. Handled like a dream. Fantastic acceleration and brakes. In less than twenty minutes of driving it, we were falling in love. With a van. A minivan. We never would've guessed how much we would love that vehicle. We were stunned. 

By this time it was nearing 6pm and the sun was already noticeably starting to go down. We still had three hours of driving to go and at least one stop to make (for food). We'd originally planned to get some groceries on the way to my parents' in order to save a trip in the coming days, but we wouldn't get to do that now. Our goal was to stop at a vegan restaurant we'd looked up in Raleigh and then just get to the parents' house as quickly as possible. My parents were already worried because we were taking so long and had been delayed in our travels multiple times, and my dad had already offered to just get us a hotel in Raleigh for the night so we wouldn't have to drive at night -- which, apparently in NC, is more dangerous than other places? I don't know. But we were on the road and told them that we'd get there when we got there, not to hold dinner for us or whatever, and that it would likely be some time before we were able to roll into town. 

I will say at this point that I've never been through Raleigh before -- not as a stopover between flights or in the city proper. Aside from an airport, this had been the first time I'd set foot in the Carolinas in three decades, so everything there was interesting and new to me. The city of Raleigh is fairly...nondescript? I don't want to put it down or anything because it is very much a city with high-rises and commercial areas and residential/shopping areas -- but it reminded me of a lot more southern version of Omaha. This in itself is not a bad thing, even though it felt like I was stepping into a similar, more southern parallel universe.

Well, Raleigh must have a thriving vegan community, because there was no shortage of vegan restaurants in the area. A quick Google search a few weeks before we left pulled up no less than five or six dedicated vegan places, and we'd found a couple of those we wanted to try while we were traveling through the area. The first, and closest one, was called -- simply -- Pure Vegan Cafe. It was a minority-female-owned business (which I didn't find out until we'd made our second trip there, but more on that later) and the menu looked quite promising.

(Yes, that's me sitting in front of their neon sign, and yes, that's what I look like now. That beard is white, y'all.)

Keep in mind that at this point it's starting to get dark and we were starving. Aside from a small bag of Five Guys fries we'd gotten in the Atlanta airport while we waited for our second flight, Daisy and I hadn't eaten much of anything for about sixteen hours or so. Despite this, we were in good spirits as the hardest part of our journey was done.

I ordered a buffalo "chicken" sandwich and a side of mac and "cheese." I put those in quotes because, obviously, vegan restaurant.

Daisy ordered what was called the breakfast burger -- which was a "burger" with fried onion, chipotle "mayo," "egg," "bacon," and "cheese" on it.

Daisy was the clear winner here. While my buffalo chicken sandwich was good and we both shared it, we also shared Daisy's breakfast burger, which was -- and I cannot stress this enough -- fucking amazing. We are certain (or at least I am, at this point) that the burger patty was an Impossible Burger, simply because no other vegan burger I've ever had has had "meat" that real. Daisy quickly declared it the best burger she'd ever had in her life, and honestly...I myself am pretty close to saying the same thing. 

Yeah.

You can see their entire menu/website here if you're so inclined. 

With food in our stomachs, we hit the road in our Spaceship Van and the GPS plotted us a roughly three-hour drive to Oak Island, mostly via interstate.

For those of you as unfamiliar with North Carolina as we were/are, the state appears to be...mostly laid out in a reasonable system of interstates just as much as any other state is, as long as you're traveling to normal places during the daytime where you can see where you are and what you're doing. When you're driving at night down these highways (which have fairly narrow lanes, honestly) and there are no streetlights marking anything, it's a drive into what appears to be an abyss of trees and forested areas alongside what just happens to be a major freeway.

When your GPS tells you to go down what I would call "back roads" to shave time off your trip, it gets even worse. 

"So your parents," Daisy said as we drove down one forested back road after another, "moved out of West Virginia and then picked the most West-Virginia-like place to get to and live in that wasn't West Virginia?"

"Looks like it," I said, "except on the other side of it is an ocean."

This is quite accurate. Oak Island is indeed an island -- it is connected to the mainland by bridges and nothing else. It is a beautiful -- and I mean beautiful -- area during the day, but at night it is terrifying to find, approach, and cross the bridge onto the island, and you'll find yourself saying aloud, as I did, "we're three miles from their house and we haven't crossed onto the island yet, where the fuck is it?" And then bam, big bridge, and you're there. 

Oak Island is a community of about 4,000 permanent residents (of which my parents are now part). During the summer months/tourist season, according to my dad, that population can increase almost tenfold. We were arriving during Labor Day weekend, the last big tourism holiday of the year, and when we pulled into town (roughly around 11:30pm or so) it was a ghost town. It was the eerie type of environment you see in horror movies. We saw maybe 2-3 other cars out and about, and it was muggy, swampy, and humid in the air enough to fog our windows and have a little of that low-lying fog on the ground in places. Everything was in shadow and darkness to the point where you never knew if there was an alligator lurking in the ditch or bushes next to you or if it would be a guy with a hook for a hand instead.

We pulled onto my parents' street and got lost because all of the houses look the same. I called my dad from the cell and said "we're literally in the street and it says we're here, but we can't find you."

"Oh, you're in the white van? We see you."

He directed us to the right driveway.

And so we were there. The parents had waited up for us, and we stayed up with them for about two hours just trying to decompress and shake off the travel before everyone went to bed. We had made it, our journey was over. And, to be fair, this was the most difficult part of the trip. Everything else would roll smoothly.

Well, smoothly enough.

But that's a tale for part II.

Hank The Tank, Addendum

Per the vet, Hank is perfectly healthy, and went from 3.2 pounds to 5.3 in the span of a month. The vet says he's on track to be a giant cat in the 10-12 pound range, maybe bigger. He got his shots, including his rabies vaccination, and Daisy registered him today. 

He is currently Daisy's work companion as she works from home, and is living his best life.