Soakin' Up Paycheck

Gravy Season 2026, Part I: The Holidays are Coming

2026-11-04T10:40:00.000-06:00

Halloween has come and gone. Welcome to November. Welcome to the return to standard time. Welcome to the holiday season. Welcome, one and all, to Gravy Season.

We had two trick-or-treaters for Halloween. I didn't get to see them, as when they came by, I was in the bathroom. $50ish worth of candy and other treats/goodies (Daisy got some Halloween party favors, pencils, bubbles, and other stuff) now sits in our closet unused.

Halloween is really weird in our neighborhood -- we either get a ton of trick-or-treaters or we get zero or almost zero. It seems like the families in our neighborhood turn off their lights and drive their kids to the rich neighborhoods on the other side of town to trick-or-treat -- our entire neighborhood goes dark except for our house and/or one or two others. It's rather sad to me. Trick-or-treating was one of my favorite things as a kid, even into my teenage years.

In my adult years I'd get up early on the morning of November 1, jump in the car, and drive to Walmart at 5am, 6am to get the half-off candy. Instead, Daisy did this earlier this week when Target marked their overstock Halloween candy as 90% off, and got us more candy than a diabetic would need for his entire lifetime. I'll be eating Snickers Pumpkins for months.

Anyway.

Yes, November is upon us, and generally that means a lot of changes across the board as we come down to the end of the year. November 1 is not only the beginning of Gravy Season, but it really begins the holiday season as well -- whether people want to believe that or not, or start preparing or not. November generally means we stop mowing the grass and doing yard work, but as it's been in the 70s (or warmer) almost every day, it feels far more like September than November, and I'll likely have to mow and trim one final time before we pack it all in for the year. Maybe not, though, if it keeps raining every weekend when I'd actually have the chance to do that.

I usually stop wearing shorts every day in November -- and usually start putting away my sandals for the season -- in favor of pulling out socks and/or slippers as necessary for the winter. I swapped out my wardrobes about two weeks ago, replacing most of my warmer-weather attire with hoodies and jackets, and did a sweep through of the closet to fill another donations bag (which I dropped off at the Goodwill a few nights ago). I also begin pulling out the bathrobes, which become a second skin for me in the deep winter months when temperatures are single-digits or below zero.

Daisy has told me that she is in the Christmas Spirit™ way earlier than normal this year -- as she has already finished all her Christmas shopping for me as well as her parents. She has also told me that while it is not a competition, this year she will "win Christmas" and there's no way I can top what she did -- that it's something I would never and have never asked for, but as she knows who I am as a person, she knows it's something I'll love.

That alone in and of itself terrifies me.

I don't want anything or need anything. Please don't spend money on me. I promise if I've never mentioned it, it's not something I want. I don't appreciate surprises as much as some people think I do or should, because if something's built up with a lot of hype, I will inevitably be disappointed or outright hate whatever it is -- and I cannot control that reaction because it's a stress response. I also don't want "experiences" or vacations or things like that -- I'm too old now. It all just seems like work and effort. I'm too old and tired to care at this point, and there's nothing more important than being at home safe with my cats. Unless that is the gift -- the gift of never needing to work again, and being able to quit my job -- that would be a gift I would actually want. Everything else just seems like a chore or needless, unnecessary expense.

Otherwise, November means I have but fifteen working days before I am on my first of two holiday vacation weeks of the season. I have a lot to accomplish in that time. I am still nowhere near done shopping for Daisy. I'd like to get her parents each something small too. I have no idea what I'm doing for my own parents this year either, or when I'll be able to get things sent to them. Bills are piling up, and my student loan repayments kicked back in, meaning I now have $400 less per month to work with when it comes to juggling expenses. It really sucks being an adult in your 40s, man. I wanted to be done with monthly worries and hassle about bills and student loans by now. I wanted to be sipping pineapple juice on a beach somewhere for the rest of my life. Or at least, y'know, no longer working. Not necessarily retired, but no longer needing to work, I mean.

Instead, there's this.

Daisy and I voted over the weekend; we dropped off our ballots at the dropbox about a mile or two from the house. It feels good to vote. I don't necessarily have high hopes for Nebraska going blue, but I do have hopes that the rest of the country will come to its senses. Maybe I shouldn't have those hopes -- I've been burned badly there before -- but I do have them.

Dolly's First Birthday

2026-10-31T23:30:00.000-05:00

Dolly, our Halloween Girl™, celebrating her first birthday (complete with witch's hat) on October 31, 2026. Photos taken by her loving mother, in our kitchen sink.

Unexpected Vacations, Part II

2026-10-27T06:42:00.000-05:00

After five and a half hours of troubleshooting with one of my company's IT technicians, and not one but two full reinstalls of Windows...my work laptop suddenly started working normally again.

What was the problem? Who fuckin' knows.

After it started working again, I had to get my major programs -- like the VPN client and our workplace's firewall/network authentication system -- reinstalled at the admin level, because without those I couldn't work.

But, after about another forty minutes of testing all systems and making sure logins were still working, I was satisfied that -- for better or worse -- I was back online and my impromptu vacation had ended. I let my leadership know I'd be back in on Monday night, with only one real night of work missed.

I then went upstairs and fell back into bed, where Mable and Dolly joined me and I slept for several more hours to reset my sleep schedule.

I worked the rest of the week without another issue. It was as if the October full moon (which was rising on Sunday night when I logged in) was trying to sabotage everything, and in jest throughout the rest of the week, that's what I chalked it up to.

But, at least I got an extra day off out of it.

Unexpected Vacations, Part I

2026-10-26T03:40:51.748-05:00

Last night, around 7:30pm and with coffee cup in hand, I sat down at my desk downstairs, opened my work laptop, and hit the power button.

It failed to boot. Instead, I got an error screen about something called a PXE boot.

Now, depending on what you find with the googles, this is anything from a boot misconfiguration to a "your hard drive is dead, so, we're exploring alternative options."

I wrestled with this really nice little Lenovo ThinkPad for approximately two hours, changing settings and running through available options. However, I am woefully out of date when it comes to trying to troubleshoot computers, and I could make no headway whatsoever -- even though every single diagnostic I could run told me there were absolutely zero problems with any of this machine's hardware.

Finally, after opening a ticket with the helpdesk and having a very painful conversation with their heavily-accented support staff, it became painfully apparent that I would likely need a complete machine replacement. I was instructed to join the support bridge in the morning once said bridge was up and running for the day and that would solidify my need for replacement, and they'd use the ticket I opened for it.

Until then, well, I'm on an unplanned, unexpected vacation of sorts -- one that may end up lasting the whole week.

Computer replacements are nothing new for our teams and never have been. I have worked for my corporate overlords since 2014, under contract with not one or two, but three different consulting firms in that time. In that time, I believe I have had seven different computers. This one is just the latest to burn out.

I also know, based on experience from one of the agents on my team having a similar issue earlier this month, that replacements take no less than three days and can take an entire week -- and go through a number of channels at our latest consulting company.

"I'm sorry, baby," Daisy told me. "I know that has to be frustrating."

"I ain't frustrated," I told her. "I'm salaried. Whether the computer works or not, or I work or not, I still get paid."

This...is true. Within reason, anyway.

This is one of those unavoidable, act-of-god sort of situations and they come along only very rarely. I can count on one hand the number of days of work I've missed because of faulty hardware in the past twelve years. Faulty hardware is also not something I can really fake and not something that's within my control, so it's not like I'm going to be penalized for it.

No, what is frustrating is leaving my teammates high and dry because I can't work, and the hassle of the replacement process itself. I will still have access to all of my corporate data and settings because those will be saved on the VPN, but anything local will be lost, and I'll have to set up accesses and pathways to everything again. The laptop is much less of an object these days as it is a passkey, a vehicle which lets me log into the actual systems to do my actual work.

So, in the morning, I will wake up and login to the troubleshooting bridge via my phone (which has Teams on it, so that at least makes things easier) and will request the official replacement. It will then get sent to fulfillment or whatever part of the company does that, they'll okay it, then they'll put a desktop image for my particular group on a new laptop -- or maybe they have them pre-made and pre-boxed, like they did when I was first hired on there -- and it'll be shipped to me (usually overnighted) with a tracking number that may or may not be provided to me before the replacement arrives.

Estimated time of arrival of new laptop, from process start to it sitting on my desk? About 48-72 hours, bare minimum, and if everything flows as it should with no snags.

That would put me at receiving it Wednesday if no issues arise, at the earliest. More realistic would be Thursday or Friday, but my goal is to harass them enough to make sure it happens by Wednesday. If it's not shipped by then I will not get it before Sunday and will be stuck until next Monday before I can get it configured, as the troubleshooting bridge is only Mon-Fri.

And then, once I get it, I've got to spend yet another hour or two on the bridge or working with one of their helpers to configure it and set it up, and then make sure I still have access to all of my corporate overlords' stuff via the VPN.

And then I have to box up and figure out how they want me to mail back/return the old laptop.

I'm not even sure I'll get the same laptop. The busted one is, as mentioned, an up-until-now wonderful Lenovo ThinkPad. But, I know some of my agents and colleagues have much lower-quality Dell laptops. So, if I don't get another ThinkPad I am going to dreadfully mourn that one, gone long before its time.

In the interim, I get...an unexpected vacation.

It's not a fun unexpected vacation, but maybe the muses or the fates or whoever have decided that no, actually, this man really needs a break and, with great irony, they decided to give it to me during the October full moon. My leadership knows and my team knows, and I'm sure none of them are thrilled, but again, it's not like I chose for this to happen. I told my long-term colleague who is essentially covering for me and running the show that believe me, I would much rather be there helping out as I could so that the full burden of everything didn't fall on everyone else.

That's actually about 75% true so I don't feel that it's a lie.

Holidays and the Future: October 2026, Part II

2026-10-25T18:07:46.412-05:00

The Christmas cards have been designed, ordered, printed, and have arrived at our house in their big orange box from Shutterfly. This year's total was, I believe, $171.

Daisy rolls her eyes at this price but she never protests because she knows how important the cards are to me.

Do I like them? Ehhhhh. This year's card is cute and well-designed, and a little bit larger than those in previous years (6x8 instead of the normal 5x7ish) but, I still maintain that last year's card design is my all-time favorite. Those of you who receive our cards -- those of you who both receive the cards and still pay attention to this website -- would probably agree. But, it's hard to outdo myself every year, and some years are going to be a little more understated than others. This year's card has a small tribute to Pete, who died shortly after last year's cards were printed and mailed, and has all six of the other cats on the front and the back.

Cards start going out on Black Friday, as you know. Them's the rules, the gentleman's agreement we all abide by.

I have used almost all of my remaining vacation time for the year to take some time off around both holidays. I took the Wednesday before and the Sunday after Thanksgiving off -- not because I need both of those days off (though I'm sure I will by the time we cross that bridge) but because I want some extra breathing space for Thanksgiving, family dinner, any shopping we may or may not want to do. There's also a bit of a buffer there in the event that we might travel, but I very seriously doubt that's going to happen. For one, we don't really have the money for it. For two and three, I don't really trust Daisy's aged Sonata any further than I can throw it, especially in cold weather, and Daisy really doesn't get any extra time off work around the holidays -- at least not time that she doesn't have to take PTO and find coverage for. So, really, it'll just be a few extra relaxation days for me, and -- when she's off work -- us. My goal is to catch up on sleep, maybe write a bit if I feel inspired, fill out and envelope/address/stamp the cards, etc.

I also took off time around my birthday and basically the entire week of Christmas, where I have already relayed to my team and my leadership that I will be 100% unavailable. One of my colleagues asked me who was backing me up.

"Hell if I know," I said. "Whoever's there, I guess."

I do not assume anyone in particular is backing me up, nor am I going to ask someone else on my team, who also likely has holiday and/or family plans, "hey, do you want to work double shifts because I'm going to be out?" No, fuck that. I am taking my PTO and whoever they want to fill in, let 'em. I could not care less at this juncture because the burnout is real.

And honestly that is how I've been feeling about my job as of late. The burnout is real. I desperately need the job to pay bills, student loans, and keep food on the table and lights on, but now entering lucky year thirteen of it I am so much less inclined to put in the 110% I have done every day for years. Most days now they are lucky if I give 70% at best, and pretend/make the team believe that it's 90% or higher. It's gotten to the point where the absolute bullshit of all of it is wearing on me. No procedural or policy changes ever streamline anything or make the job easier; we are continually asked to do more with less, and then are asked to operate off of rules instead of "vibes" -- because with "vibes" it's hard to pinpoint who the corporate overlords can blame when we fail because we're set up for failure.

If I were to operate on rules and policies exclusively instead of, as mentioned, "vibes" (their terms, not mine) the system would grind to a halt. Cue malicious compliance. Part of what makes everything there suck worse is that we're constantly expected to have magic wands, or move mountains, or fix things that we know nothing about that are not our jobs, specialties, or department whatsoever -- oh, and do it yesterday! why have I had to wait three days for this to be fixed? Etc. If I go by rules and policies, and redirect the unreasonable folks to their unreasonable account teams for their unreasonable demands (just as an example) my higher leadership's phone lines would never stop ringing with whiny customers.

You may think I am exaggerating this; I really, really am not. We need about double the staffing we have now and about half the workload in order to function like an actual, normal workplace where people don't want to kill themselves and where their mental health does not deteriorate more and more every night. Again, you may think I am exaggerating here too. I am not -- I have had colleagues tell me how terrible and toxic our job is for their mental health, and I absolutely do not disagree. I have called it out myself on many occasions to our leadership, whose response seems to be something along the lines of "yeah, you're preaching to the choir, man."

And to think, all they need to do to solve about 90% of the problems is hire and train about three more people per shift. That's it; that's literally all they need to do. Give me three more people on my team that aren't absolute morons, can understand and read/write English and follow directions, and are coachable/willing and able to learn and retain information and almost every single problem I have with that job goes away.

So yes, that's the long way of me saying I'm taking the holiday time I want to, goddammit, and what happens while I'm not there isn't going to be my problem.

Anyway, moving onward.

We're literally a week and only a week away from Halloween -- which falls on a Saturday this year -- and the wife and I have zero plans for it whatsoever. Halloween almost never falls on a night I'm not working, let alone on a Saturday. I am forty-three years old, I have been married to a spunky, Halloween-loving woman for twelve years, and aside from some spooky season decorations that we tend to leave up year-round anyway, we have done nothing.

"I find it shocking and appalling that we have no plans for Halloween," I told Daisy tonight.

Like, it's not like I want to go out dancing or go trick-or-treating or anything like that, but having some or any plans could be fun. I lamented that none of our friends, but apparently not even the most obvious ones, had mentioned plans to throw any sort of Halloween party this year -- and we have some eccentric, wealthy friends too, the kind who do it up when it comes to this stuff.

Still, nothing.

Halloween is Dolly's birthday.

This little goblin turns one on Halloween. She was born in the shelter on Halloween last year, and I'm surprised she wasn't given some spooky shelter name because of it -- but at least she never had to live on the streets and face the danger and disease that comes with that. Instead, Pete died in early December and she learned how to coexist with other cats in the shelter until we adopted her on New Year's Eve.

Dolly remains the absolute sweetest cat in the house, and the total spiritual successor to Pete. Daisy thinks that Charlie is sweeter, and don't get me wrong, Charlie is a really sweet boy, but Dolly is -- dare I say it -- the perfect cat. She spends equal amounts of time with us and loves us both very deeply in different ways. She is so very Pete-like in so many ways and so very much herself in so many others. I don't know exactly how to describe Dolly. She just fills me with so much love, so much joy. She has also, as of this afternoon, been turned into a fridge magnet and stickers for this year's holiday cards (both of which are hard tradition in our household).

The other cats are fine. Hank has another eye appointment a week before Thanksgiving, and we are likely to cancel it at this juncture since he hasn't had any other eye flare-ups in almost a year. I told Daisy that if he remains okay and nothing else appears to be going on with his eyes, we should probably cancel the appoint by, say, a week or so before it's supposed to happen. That'll give them enough notice, I think. We have a standing order with auto-ship for his eye drops, so unless they tell us we need to bring him back in before they'll give us a prescription refill, we're probably fine at this point.

Emmy remains Hank's steadfast wife and has been slowly becoming more loving and receptive to touch and snuggles from us as well as the other cats other than Hank. As you may recall, Emmy really, really loved Pete and snuggled up with him every chance she got, especially if Hank was somewhere else in the house. Hank was her husband, but she treated Pete more like a father or grandfather. To his credit, he would love on her and baby her and hold her in his arms. It was really quite sweet. Well, when Pete started going downhill and his kidneys started failing more and more, his smell changed -- Emmy knew he was sick and started cuddling with him less and less. The others did too, for the most part -- they could tell. And then when Pete died last December -- to the other cats he just vanished; he was there one day and then we took him someplace and he never came back -- something inside Emmy broke. She did not want to lay on the couch with us anymore without him there. Instead she took to laying under or inside things, as if to hide and silently grieve. She didn't come out of this pattern of behavior until well into the summer months, where she slowly started getting up on the couch with us again, as well as letting Gary or sometimes Dolly lay with her. It's been a slow process for Emmy.

The Double Trouble boys are, as expected, double troubling as per the usual:

Charlie cuddles up to Daisy in bed every morning for love, just like Pete used to, and if I sleep too long Gary makes sure he comes and wakes me up. They've grown up into such sweet boys.

Mable is also becoming more sweet by the day; she has now taken to coming to bed and curling up with me at my head, tight up against me, like Pete used to sleep with me. She will lay in the same spot all day and not move until I do. While Dolly loves to sleep on my feet or on my legs, Mable is slowly becoming a teddy bear kitty.

Almost all of them have birthdays coming up soon. Dolly's birthday is on Halloween, as mentioned before, but Emmy's follows the week after (age 3), Charlie in the beginning of December (age 2), Gary five weeks after that in January (age 2), and Mable a month or so later (age 3). We'll do photos for their birthdays as usual, but also we'll be doing their Christmas photos as possible too.

Daisy has told me that she has finished her Christmas shopping. Not just for me, but for her parents, for her siblings and our nieces and nephews, everyone.

More than that, she told me she went way over budget this year for me for Christmas.

Well, she must be a master at hiding it because I have seen nothing enter this house or be hidden away. Now, mind you, I sleep all day and she does not, and anything that would be delivered during the day she could probably easily hide and I would never know about it, but it's not even Halloween yet and she's done Christmas shopping for me? That sounds suspect AF, especially for my famously, notoriously ADHD wife.

"You're going to love all of it," she told me. "But I didn't get a single thing off your list."

I have a public "Christmas List" on Amazon that she and a select few other people have direct access to. I periodically add and subtract things throughout the year, and Daisy usually gets a couple of the things on it. In the past, her parents and my parents have pulled some things from it as well, so I generally just keep it as a novelty. Anything I really want I'll just buy outright and not bother anyone else with, so it's more for fun than anything else, like the old Sears Wish Book and Montgomery Ward catalogs of the 80s and 90s.

I have a good bit of stuff for Daisy that I've been slowly collecting since, say, early June or so (yes, I always start early) but I am nowhere near done for her yet. I am trying to keep some space on my cards so that when I see that unskippable Black Friday deal somewhere, I can just snap it up and be done. But no, as it stands now, if I were to present to her what I have at this point I'd expect a "that's it?" in response from her. And it would be warranted.

I don't know. I'll see what happens, honestly. I have good and bad years for gift-giving, and on the bad years I usually find something that would normally be way out of our price range and get it just to say I'm done. I can't do that anymore; student loans are being paid again (I paid my first installment this past weekend) and budgets are going to get creative again.

The Hole in the Wall Gang: October 2026, Part I

2026-10-18T03:54:43.479-05:00

The Denverites are in town this weekend -- at least, most of them. It's Daisy's sister and her four boys aged nine to seventeen. Currently, it is their fall break (Daisy's sister is the principal of a charter school that she helped to fund, institute, and build, so their family schedules operate around the school schedules).

They were not here for 24 hours before one of the boys put a hole in the wall of the spare bedroom at the parents' (read: used to be Daisy's sister's room, now is used as the spare for any visiting guests).

The parents are, understandably, pissed.

"How did they put a hole in the wall?" I asked Dad last night when all of the boys were in the sun room with their mother and their aunt. "Like, you have to try to put a hole in the wall."

"With his head," Dad said.

"With his head?"

Did I hear that correctly?

Mama just looked at me and shook her head.

"It's bad," she said. "You have no idea."

I did not go to look at the hole in the wall. Aside from the fact that it's sort of privacy-invasive to just wander into the bedroom when Daisy's sister is staying in town, even if she's not in the room at the time, I just...like, it's not important. I'll look at it next week when everyone's gone again, if it's not fixed by that point.

The boys love to come to town to see their grandparents as well as me and Daisy. Our oldest nephew is 17 and is fielding many offers from many colleges for, essentially, full-ride scholarships to their engineering schools. He wants to go into mechanical and aerospace engineering, and he is absolutely bright enough to excel in those fields. I've talked to him at length both at Christmas and last night about colleges -- where he wants to go and why, etc.

It's wild how things have changed. When Daisy and I first got together, this kid was barely four -- didn't even come up to my waist, and barely spoke complete sentences that his mother had to translate for me. When I met Daisy's sister (his mother) she was pregnant with her second child. That was 2013. She now has four of these boys, with that waist-high child now over six feet tall and about to start college.

The other boys, though...they're far younger and are much more boys in the stereotypical sense. They are sweet, hyper, talkative, intense, active boys, full of so much energy that I absolutely guarantee you I never had at their ages. And they love adventures, and they love their Aunt Daisy and Uncle Brandon.

Do you know what Needohs and Squishies are?

It's okay if you don't. I don't think I knew anything about them before, say, July or so.

To save you a lot of time, they are stress-ball-like toys made by various companies (some legitimate, some knock-offs) that are highly collectible, and range in size from, say, a ping pong ball to medium-sized teddy bears (I am not good with sizes, so, figure it out). Some change colors, some are soft squishes, some are hard squishes, some stretch, some light up, some are fuzzy, some constantly feel wet and sticky, etc.

It's a thing. It's a big thing. I've not seen a fad like this since the Furby, the Tickle-Me-Elmo, or POGs. This shit is bananas. B-a-n-a-n-a-s. Bananas.

Sometimes quite literally.

Here's the thing, though -- they're not just a kids' thing, they're super popular with collectors, resellers, and the neurodivergent community. It's the very definition of craze and fad. It's wild to see. And our nieces and nephews are all obsessed with them.

As is Daisy.

Now, let me explain this a bit. I am not faultless here, nor am I completely uninterested. I see the appeal of these toys and I own some of them myself. I have also been an enabler and pusher, and yes, there are some of the limited-edition Needohs I am still looking for on a daily basis -- I am, as they say, on the hunt.

Daisy and I have spent weeks, months, and hundreds (I am only guessing) of dollars on hunting, obtaining, and collecting Needohs and squishies. Every week it's a new adventure, and maybe perhaps I'll eventually get my last two glow penguins.

Daisy and I have been first in line at several stores on "drop days" when the new holiday displays are going onto the floor, and we have both been nearly trampled and have been physically injured by swarming people. Daisy has a big bruise on her shoulder and was hit in the head last week during a drop day event at Kohls, and that same event got me nearly knocked down and elbowed in the ribs.

I wish I were making this up. I now have greater respect for my mother, who told me she fought in the Cabbage Patch Wars™ for me in 1983.

Anyway.

For the most part it's a very inclusive, fun community and it's the thrill of the chase that is the exciting part. Well, to our nephews who love having adventures with their aunt, they were thrilled when Daisy offered to take them Needoh hunting this morning.

As an aside, my wife is great with the kids. Any kids. She has the patience of a saint, she can corral four boys (only three of which really need supervision) into one nearly twenty-year-old Hyundai and take them to multiple stores, buying them multiple things at each place and getting them vegan cookies and milkshakes afterwards (not kidding) and they will look at her like she's a golden goddess -- they will remember adventures like this the rest of their lives.

So that's what they did today. Daisy left the house early, drove over to the parents' to pick up the boys, ran the boys around all day (partially because she's a good aunt and partially because she knew the parents, and the boys' mother, needed a break), brought them back, came back home, changed her clothing, left again to go volunteer for her weekly kitten feeding time at the shelter, came back home again, she showered, we each took a nap for three hours, got up, went to Barnes & Noble and Kohls, and then -- at 8pm -- we pulled back into the driveway of the parents' house to spend the rest of the waking Saturday evening with the family because in the morning, before full dawn likely, they will be back on the road to Denver.

We don't always spend this much time with the family when they're in town. Truth be told, sometimes it's really difficult to spend that much time with Daisy's sister and the boys, either due to work schedules or prior commitments or just plain lack of time and energy.

But.

This trip is likely the last hurrah for all of them to be in Omaha before the new year. They switch off years for holidays, and they spent the holidays in Omaha last year, so this year they'll be doing it with the in-laws' family and not us. This means, unless we wanted to spend $100 or more to ship their stuff to them, we needed to give them their Christmas presents now. Which, of course, the boys were wildly happy with.

Daisy got her sister a cooler and a giant Igloo water jug, since they're always on the go, as well as a few other little odds and ends things. She got the boys all sorts of Needohs and squishies not only today, but over the past few months -- that's how we got started on the trend, in fact; we were doing it for Christmas presents for all of the nieces and nephews and got sucked in. So, they got all those.

My present for the boys, as well as their father (for when they get home, of course) was the newly-finished, finally locked-down RetroDrive. Volume one, 2026.

Behold, the contents of the aforementioned RetroDrive:

Click to scroll and zoom. Or don't, I'm a picture, not a cop.

This is a good starting collection, I thought.

The boys were absolutely thrilled by this and started watching episodes of The Real Ghostbusters almost immediately. While it's a great choice, I found it interesting they went right to that first with no hesitation. They also expressed interest in The Tick, which I also assured them was another fantastic choice.

Mind you, unless they've seen them somewhere else, these younger boys have no idea what these shows are -- The Real Ghostbusters concluded its run in 1991, long before any of these boys were ever a twinkle in their parents' eyes. The Tick, I believe, ran from 1994-1996ish, so at best it's still thirty years old.

"My advice to you," I said to my oldest nephew, pulling him aside quietly, "is to find a way to copy that stuff to a laptop or to the cloud or somewhere you will have a backup of it as soon as possible once you get home, because I can't write-protect it and have it still be accessible/playable on anything and everything you plug it into. That means if something gets accidentally deleted or corrupted, it's gone." He acknowledged.

Truthfully what I gave the kids isn't 1/50th of the stuff I have, likely. I'm ballparking that number. I've amassed an absolute behemoth of a media collection over the years -- I joked to my oldest nephew that if I play my cards right, I've got Christmas presents for them for the next decade if I retain all that stuff. I was only about half kidding. I know it was such a hit this year that I can only try to top it next year. And that's before I present it to the other half of the family too.

Fall 2026 Begins, Part II

2026-09-27T06:37:13.533-05:00

Fall feels like a blessing, a rebirth in many ways. I've written here before about how it always felt like each fall was a new chance, a reset, when school started. You could always reinvent who you were and say you grew and matured over the summer.

You could say that in college too, of course, but it was always a bit "you're still doing the I've grown and changed thing over the summer, bro?"

As we near October -- historically one of the unluckiest months of the year for me -- I think about Octobers past and present. I've been observing and taking in a lot over the years, and I can finally tell you that, yes, with age does come wisdom. I laugh to myself to think about how much I thought I knew as a kid, or even a decade ago, about what life would be like as an adult in my forties.

I could have looked to my parents too, I guess. I am 43. When my mother was 43, I was a junior in college. When my dad was 43, he'd just met my mother and they were trying to figure out the beginnings of their relationship while both of them were just coming out of horrible previous relationships.

Me, at 43 in October 2026? I am a non-smoking, non-drinking, non-vaping, non-meat-eating vegetarian with six cats, a house and a wife of twelve years. I weigh 300 pounds and I have diabetes.

Winning?

I mean, could definitely be worse, right?

People seem to think life is complicated. It is not. Life, itself, is remarkably easy. We add the complications ourselves, and choose to live with them. As I get older, I find myself less and less burdened by those self-imposed complications. For example, I have zero qualms whatsoever with packing up some shit, getting as much money as possible and fleeing the fucking country if necessary. Hell, I'll change my name too if it lets me escape my problems and start over. Thirty years ago I could just decide that I was changing my personality for the new school year -- I would now be the kid with long hair, or the kid who liked metal music, or whatever. Now, in the present, I can ctrl+alt+delete and reboot my entire life if I want to. The hard reset. And I have no compunctions about this whatsoever. I'll take the name of one of my characters from one of my short stories, and figuratively disappear. Bonus: maybe it would get me out of my student loan and credit card debt, too.

I am not actually going to do this, of course, but my point here is that I have no problem with it. And so many people I know couldn't actually fathom doing it -- they have too many friends, too many commitments, children, jobs they care about, etc. That's cute. Meanwhile:

Anyway.

Most of September has been punctuated by chores. And I don't just mean cleaning the house or doing yard work, though there's been a lot of that too -- I mean stuff that must be taken care of that we don't necessarily want to do, but have to do. For example -- this afternoon I processed the renewal of Daisy's car registration. New stickers and paperwork should get here in a few days. I should have done it weeks ago, but I forgot until this morning.

Yesterday we figured out the new plans for my student loan repayment, since that's about to become a thing again. To pay mine back, I'll be paying about $400 a month for the next decade...but after that, the remaining balance is wiped out/forgiven. Believe me, I am not okay with this, but as that's the cheapest plan and as it's the only one that wipes the remainder of the balance after ten years, that's what I'm picking. I am also hoping that sometime within the next ten years, we get a progressive president who looks at this horseshit and says "yeah, no, we're wiping this debt off the board now" and makes it all magically go away.

Daisy will be paying something like $250 a month on hers as well, and hers (because they were undergrad, amongst other reasons I guess) don't give her the option of the rest of the balance getting wiped after a decade; she has to pay it off in full, until we get the aforementioned progressive president mentioned above.

I will also add that both of us are still in administrative forbearance; we don't have to pay anything yet. But, it's coming back, and soon.

In other news, the rainy season has returned to Omaha. We have received rain every day for the past seventeen days in a row as of this writing. No, it's not been all-day, drenching rain, but some rain every day. The next two days are supposed to be relatively dry, and then for the next week the skies are supposed to open again, and weather forecasters are already predicting something like 2-3 inches of new rain by the end of this coming week.

I don't mind this, and I certainly don't mind the massive temperature shift from highs in the 80s and 90s to temperatures hovering between 55-65 24x7 now. My allergies, however, beg to differ, and the yard work/yard mowing that begs to be done but can't be, because of inches of rain leaving veritable puddles in the yard also beg to differ.

There is always something else to do, of course. We still have mice in our garage (we have never seen them, but Daisy is pretty sure of it) that we'd like to evict sometime in the next month or two at most by cleaning out the rest of the garage. Daisy started doing some cleaning/trashing out there a few weeks ago, and we need to just go through and finish all of that together. Ideally I'd like to be completely done with the garage cleaning by Halloween.

Halloween is also Dolly's first birthday, and Empress's third birthday follows the week after. All of these cats are growing up and getting older so fast. Dolly and Mable are almost the same size now, and it's really hard to tell them apart in the dark or an otherwise dimly-lit room. I made the joke to Daisy tonight that we have boys and girls in small, medium, and large.

Small: Dolly, Gary
Medium: Hank, Mable
Large: Emmy, Charlie

Dolly is probably nine or ten pounds now, and is still the smallest. Gary was ten pounds at his last vet visit. Hank was fifteen-something pounds (I can't remember exact numbers now) and Mable was thirteen-something. Emmy and Charlie are the giant ones, with Emmy over sixteen and Charlie over eighteen.

All of this is slowly changing though. I've noticed they've been eating far less food now that we've added a different dry food into the mix -- they like it more and I guess it keeps them fuller longer. Hank used to look far fatter and feel heavier than he is now -- like he's balanced out. I think Mable is lighter now too. Gary is finally growing and looks like he's growing into the giant Maine Coon boy I expected him to be. I also expect Emmy to keep growing for another year or so -- she's a massive girl and really, really exhibits those Maine Coon genes. Charlie...well, we've not really noticed a difference with Charlie, but we hope that he evens out/balances out too, just like Hank and Mable have. It took Hank three years to get there though, so we're cautiously optimistic and biding our time.

With the coming of October, the holidays are upon us. Again.

First comes Canadian Thanksgiving (October 12, also known as Columbus Day here in the states). Then Halloween. Then American Thanksgiving, Black Friday, my birthday, Christmas and New Year's all in a row, one after another after another. Can I already say how tired I am of the holidays? It's not that I'm not in the spirit for it -- because, really, after this very long and troubling year, I desperately need something to look forward to, so I am filled with holiday cheer. But also I am already filled with fatigue and the holidays really, really pile that on worse.

I still have not made the Christmas cards. It's not that I'm procrastinating on it because I dread doing it -- far from it -- I just need the time and energy to spend the better part of a day or night going through designs, editing designs, mocking up said designs, doing color and photo swaps, etc. One of our friends is supposed to come over on a Saturday night in a week or two; maybe I'll take the time after I come upstairs (read: letting Daisy get her "girls time" in) and work on them then. I don't know. My goal is still to get them done as soon as possible so that they can be ordered, printed up, and then crossed off my list once they get here in the mail.

Of course, I also need to go order more stamps too.

Fall 2026 Begins, Part I

2026-09-20T03:00:00.000-05:00

We had the TV installed and mounted yesterday morning. It is big. It is stupid big for our bedroom. The antenna arrives for it on Tuesday. All of the streaming services are already hooked up to it and working.

The dentist appointments were cancelled. Daisy couldn't get off work, and honestly I didn't want to go anyway. We have follow-up appointments in March, and should be fine until then.

Gas is almost $5 a gallon here in Omaha. Diesel is almost $7. I have never seen prices like this -- not even during the recession years of 2007-09.

Truckers are allegedly planning a massive strike starting around October 1 if fuel prices don't go back down. I'm debating on whether I should order a bunch of extra meds from my prescription site before then just in case.

Daisy is dropping weight like a stone on the Mounjaro and is no longer testing as diabetic when it comes to her blood sugars and A1C. I am the exact opposite -- I have somehow, almost inexplicably, gained 20 pounds in the past six months and my A1C has increased since my last doctor's visit in June. My diet and lifestyle have not changed -- the only thing that has really changed over the summer is that I quit vaping.

I an really frustrated and frazzled in general. It feels like my body is in revolt. I went from being able to get good, satisfying sleep to now only being able to get 3-4 hours at a time again. I went from feeling great physically and noticing a difference in how I looked because I'd steadily been dropping weight to, all of a sudden, gaining a lot of it back and my diabetes numbers once more getting out of whack. This also does not bode well going into the holidays, where there are three big meal days in a row coming up (Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and Christmas).

We're only a few weeks out from Canadian Thanksgiving, and it is wild that it's been almost a year since we were in Canada last fall and celebrated it (a day or two early, but together nonetheless) with the family up there and went to Daisy's cousin's wedding. It does not feel like it's been a year at all.

But then I remind myself that a year ago at this time, Pete still had almost three months left to live and Dolly hadn't even been born yet -- and it feels like a decade has passed.

Three months from today is my 44th birthday.

My cousin announced last week that his third book is coming out soon.

I sometimes wonder if I've awakened in some sort of parody universe -- where everything is skewed and slightly or (at times) greatly different than what I believe it "should" be. Some people have some interesting coping mechanisms for what this world has become and is becoming. For example, a close friend of mine once told me that he does a watchthrough of The West Wing every 18 months or so just to be reminded what a functioning, idealistic (but also, realistic) government is supposed to look and act like, and...I can't fault him for that. When I messaged him a few years back that Daisy and I were doing the same, he lauded me for it.

I just try to drown out the noise on everything I can. It's the equivalent of just putting my head down and waiting it out, the equivalent of zipping the sleeping bag closed over one's head to conserve as much body heat as possible throughout the dark, freezing night.

There's a lot of emotions and feelings I just can't shake these days. I wouldn't say I'm depressed (believe me, I know what that feels like) but it feels like everything is a struggle. I am motivated to do nothing, I have no ambition or drive to succeed anymore, and I just want to...keep myself busy with unimportant nonsense, I guess.

The End of Summer, Part II: September's Additions and Subtractions

2026-09-13T03:56:00.000-05:00

As we close in on mid-month, it has finally started to cool down in Omaha. Yesterday's high barely hit 75, and I have my window open at 4am as the temperature outside is, purportedly, 60 degrees. Fall is definitely here. The NFL season has started, WVU has won their first two football games of the season, the Steelers play today and the Chiefs play tomorrow night. Yes, fall is here.

To celebrate Labor Day weekend last week, Daisy and I pored over sales and ran comparisons between models, but I am happy to report that we are having a 65-inch Roku TV delivered and mounted, professionally, on our bedroom wall later this week.

Did we need a giant (ten inches larger than our downstairs television) TV mounted on our bedroom wall? No, but we've been talking about it for years. I would've been happy with a smaller model, but Daisy wanted the big wall, movie theater experience if we were going to do it. So I said sure, fuck it, let's do it.

And then a week after we ordered it, we got text message notifications that we both had 11am dentist appointments on Friday -- the day the TV folks are supposed to come anytime between 7am and 7pm to put the TV up on the wall.

We're debating on whether we should just cancel the appointments -- they're just teeth cleanings -- because rescheduling a delivery and install of the TVs will be hella difficult, and Daisy does not know whether she will be able to take the time off work for the appointments anyhow (the appointments were made long before she was in the position she is in now within her job).

I, on the other hand, was going to just be here and take care of the install guys myself, handling it and making sure they were supervised and the cats were out of the way -- because, honestly, how long could it take to drill a mount into the wall and put a TV on it? Ten minutes? Fifteen? We could've done it ourselves but instead of mess with the hassle, Daisy and I both decided to not stress about it and just pay the experts to do it.

As for the dentist, that's up in the air. We already have our next set of appointments after these ones set for March anyway. It is what it is. I told her if she can't get off work for our appointments or if it would be exceedingly difficult to do so, believe me, I have no problems canceling a teeth cleaning. It saves me from needing to leave the house on a Friday.

Because, folks, that's the type of lazy I have become in my old age. I don't have to leave the house and play a game of "who's in my mouth?" while HGTV blares above my head in the dental chair? Okay, cool.

Truth be told, there's a lot of things I need to be doing this fall, and especially this month -- for one, I have not created the Christmas cards yet. I wanted to do it tonight, but I am now too exhausted to do so and would not be able to make good judgment calls at 4am. For two, I have bills I need to assess and pay. Again, too tired tonight at this juncture to do math. And the third thing I have to do is...I have to figure out my new student loan repayment plan before the end of the month.

That last one is a big one.

Because they canceled the SAVE plan I was on for income-based repayment, we got notices a few months ago that after July 1, we would be told by our loan servicers that we'd have a 60-day window to login and select a new repayment plan for our loans. I'm sure if you have student loans, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Well, I was on an income-based repayment plan and I was paying something like $200 a month for my loans -- which I was fine with, I guess. It was an added expense every month, but it was what it was.

And then Covid hit, and everyone's payments were put on hiatus and/or were thrown into forbearance. And...it didn't end. I think I made one payment after Covid hit, and it was done the week before everything had been put on hold. Well, once I select my new payment plan, that hold finally comes off and for the first time in well over five years, I will be paying on student loans again. Except, well, that income-based repayment plan likely isn't going to work for me anymore as I now make a lot more money than I did when I last tried to recertify that plan.

"Your bare minimum is going to be something like $300-400 a month," Daisy told me last weekend, after doing some rough calculations.

"My goal," I said, "is to pay the bare minimum possible every month until the remainder is discharged."

There's something like a 15-year stipulation for student loans for undergrads and, I think, 20 years for grad students, where anything past that point just gets waived/discharged. Covid helped that for us big time, as did the court battle for the SAVE plan putting us back on hiatus. 2033 would be 20 years for me. So that's what, six years and change? Psh, if I have to, I should be able to handle that. And, likely, it won't even be that long as we should elect a Democrat president in 2028 who will likely wipe out the vast majority of student loan debt anyhow. I'll roll the dice on that, sure.

I will note here that I took those loans out in the long-long-ago, the earth-that-was, in 2010 -- and I took them out because I needed to eat and put gas in the Monte Carlo while I was in grad school. I needed to keep the lights on, I needed to keep food in the fridge and in the bowls of the cats. It wasn't like OMG, I can get free money from the government? Okay! It was a necessity for survival. And I knew even then I did not and would not want to pay them back when they came due. I was right there.

Shit, I'm 43 now. Back then, I didn't expect to live past 40 in any real reasonable fashion, ever. I would either drink and smoke myself to death, I'd die in a fiery car crash, or if neither of those things happened, I would likely -- at some point, anyway -- off myself. None of those scenarios entailed doing it after age 40. I was, after all, desperately alone and lonely and didn't see much of a future for myself outside of being poor and teaching class after class every semester until it was time to die.

You know, figuratively, anyway.

Fast forward to today and life is very different, but still.

The End of Summer, Part I

2026-09-06T03:36:00.000-05:00

Well, here we are. Another year, another summer gone.

Summer 2026 seems like it disappeared -- evaporated before our eyes and vanished into nothingness as we held it in our arms. I told Daisy this past weekend that it feels like we just got back from Canada two weeks ago, not two months ago.

It is now Labor Day weekend. Well, for me anyway. For me it's been Labor Day weekend for two days already. I took off Wednesday the 2nd, and as I am already out until Tuesday the 8th, I have a rather uncommon stretch of six days in a row off work, unfettered, for downtime and relaxation.

I am, quietly and slowly/peacefully, trying to reset myself for fall. With fall comes cooler temperatures and work tends to slow down a bit (it has not yet, but it tends to). Football, both NFL and college, comes back this week. Schools are already back in session, of course, and school buses are continually rolling through the neighborhoods of Omaha once more. Pumpkin spice lattes have become a thing again, and I'm already starting the season right -- despite the fact that it was almost 100 degrees every day this week, I have already enjoyed a few pumpkin spice lattes, both made at home as well as purchased. That's right, I'm a basic bitch.

Anyway.

Fall this year somehow feels different as well -- I haven't made the Christmas cards yet. I don't even have good photos for the cards yet this year. This time last year I was worried about how long Pete was going to last and prepping for our trip to Canada -- this year we've already been to Canada and back again, Pete is dead, and we have a Dolly now.

Speaking of Dollys, I should probably mention how the passing of three greats this past week or so have really felt like a gut punch. I'm sure if you've not been living under a rock, you are aware that Dolly Parton died. Some of you who paid a little more close attention also would have heard that Tim Curry and Peter Cullen both died as well.

Look, I realize I am old now. I also realize that I am far past the age of where any celebrity, big or small, should have a profound affect on me if and when they eventually die. I can likely count on one hand the number of celebrities out there who I could name who I would be affected more by, and whose work really shaped a large part of my life more than Tim Curry and Peter Cullen.

I am sure there are people reading this website who don't really know who I am, or are reading it for the first time. Certainly some of my readers here have never met me in real life, or if they have, they have not seen me in over two decades -- I understand that and it's okay. But, for those of you who know me well, who have known me well for most if not all of my life, you realize that The Rocky Horror Picture Show affected me in profound ways. Not sexually, of course, but creatively, musically, even spiritually to an extent. Was it a bad movie? Oh hell yes. Is it still my favorite movie of all time, and is Tim Curry a giant part of that? Also yes. I realize his health had been failing in the past decade or so, and yes, he was an old man, but losing him is a tremendous loss to fans of not just musical theater, but of the man himself.

Similarly, Peter Cullen voiced my childhood. Since I don't expect most normal people to know who he was, here:

And a Canadian, too.

Every time I heard Optimus Prime as a child well into my adulthood, it was Peter Cullen (with the exceptions of a few roles in offshoot series, where Garry Chalk voiced one or more characters of other/some variations of Optimus). I am and always have been a huge fan of anything Transformers. I own the entire original series and the movie as well as all of Generation 2 and the sequel series Beast Wars and Beast Machines. I went to see the first...several? Michael Bay movies in the theater based on the fact that Cullen had returned to the role of Optimus Prime for those films. The man was loved in my heart and mind.

Everyone dies eventually, of course. I am likely going to see a lot of my heroes die of old age at some point before I kick off this mortal coil as well. One of my former friends told me that when Bob Dylan dies, she's going to wear black for a month, and...I get that. I echo that sentiment. I can't think of a major musical icon dying suddenly that really affected me and my own generation -- I guess Kurt was likely the last one, and even that was more Gen X than it was me as an elder millennial. Maybe Amy Winehouse? Still not the same level as Kurt though. I'm talking someone who my generation would be very, very upset over because they're a universally beloved household name. I don't know if anyone exists like that for my generation, someone that everyone knows.

But everyone knew Dolly Parton.

Young and old, everyone knew Dolly by music, looks, acting, or association. At the very least I don't think there's anyone on the planet in English-speaking countries who did not know who Dolly Parton was or who hadn't heard of her by name. And for those folks paying attention? She was universally beloved. It's not really hyperbole when I say that, either. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would have said something like "to hell with Dolly Parton, she's an awful human being" because nobody I've ever seen or known has ever disliked her.

Dolly was not of my generation; she was of my parents and grandparents' generation -- but we all knew her. We all adored her. We all knew more about her than most people would care to admit. And she was such a remarkable person, a true example of a great role model to follow. I am not going to go into details here because all of you can feel free to research her on your own, and many of you already know -- but I am going to tell two stories about Dolly, one short and one long.

The short one is, because of the association of "Dolly" to "Dolly Parton," I always wondered how many people immediately assumed that Daisy had named our cat Dolly after her. Of all the names ending in -olly, she chose Dolly -- over Holly, Polly, and/or Molly. That will, always, boggle my mind to an extent. And to be fair, Daisy did question the cat's name a number of times, not knowing that it really fit her. Well, now ten months into having that cat, the name fits her very well. She is a very vocal, outspoken girl with big words and a big voice, but she still has a little frame and a little face. She is our Dollbaby, our Dollface.

The second story is the longer story. As you folks may know, Daisy's grandfather built guitars. I don't think he ever really did it for a living, but more of a hobby. It seemed to be much more of a labor of love than anything else, but it seemed like his output increased as he got older. He would sell them for extra money, sometimes large sums of money -- so okay, maybe it was what he did for a living after a while. He didn't just build guitars, either -- he built banjos and dobros, he made his own guitar straps in his same workshop on the same workbench (and apparently also did other leatherwork as well, such as belts).

I don't know how many guitars he cranked out every year, or over his lifetime. It was a lot of work. They are some of the finest, most beautiful guitars I have ever seen. He made them in all sizes, and when we visited up there for the first time in 2015, I actually got to see some of them in-progress -- as well as got to briefly "jam" with him and Daisy's uncle (his son) in the basement where we spent most of our time a few months ago when we were there.

When he died, in 2022, the remaining completed guitars (all but two or three of them) were distributed throughout the family. Daisy got one, Daisy's sister and our nephew got one, etc. I am sure Mama has at least one, if not more than one, of his guitars too. The rest went to his sons, all that I know of but two -- they adorn the wall of the basement living room; one is a normal acoustic and the other is a shiny, silver dobro.

It turns out that his dobros got the attention, eventually, of someone quite famous.

That someone was Dolly Parton.

On the wall downstairs in that basement is a letter Daisy's grandfather received from Dolly Parton. It addressed him by name and said (and I am paraphrasing here) that he made the best dobros she'd ever seen, and invited him to join her to play one at the Dixie Stampede, where (at the time) she performed every night.

Now, this letter did not have a date on it. I don't know how authentic it is, only that the family claims it's absolutely authentic. I don't know when Dolly stopped performing nightly at the Dixie Stampede. But it is a remarkable artifact and conversation piece. I have a high-definition photo of the letter, which I will obviously not share here as it has family information/names on it. The letter, to this day, hangs on Grandpa's computer desk downstairs in the basement. He did not frame it -- he was not really a framing man, from what I gathered -- but it hangs there in bare paper as if it were a shopping list, on a desk in a basement where everything sits as if frozen in time since the day the man died in 2022.

So there's the stories. Now, onward...

August, Part III: Things Going Boom

2026-08-23T05:48:04.685-05:00

Well, The Box is almost full.

For those of you paying attention over the past month or so, you will know that The Box is my personal media drive, a 4TB external hard drive filled with basically everything I've ever archived. It is reaching its max capacity, which is wild to me as I never would have expected to fill a four terabyte drive so quickly.

"What is all of this for?" Daisy asked me. "Like what if you die? What am I going to do with this stuff?"

Now that's an interesting way to phrase a question, I guess.

"Watch it," I said. "You'll have entertainment for years."

That is kind of the goal, to be honest with you. I've always been of the mindset that everything is temporary. If we somehow end up living in some post-apocalyptic wasteland in the next decade or two and the internet has been wiped off the Earth, at least I'll have hard drives full of entertainment. You know, provided electricity is still a thing, of course. I guess it applies if we have to go live off the grid somewhere in a cabin in the woods too. Otherwise, this stuff is a time capsule for family and friends who may, eventually, stumble across it.

Likewise, as my time of archiving may be coming to a close, The Retrodrive Project for the kids in the family will soon be complete as well. Most major cartoons of the 80s and 90s are represented at least in part, if not in entirety. I'd like to expand it if possible, but the Retrodrive HDDs are only 500GB each. This sounds ludicrously large, but it's not. Some of the larger series are something like 20-60GB each, and that space fills quickly. So it is a highly, carefully curated collection.

I am a very tired man. I have not slept well in a week or so. I don't know why. Normally now that I'm no longer addicted to nicotine, my body isn't waking me up every 4-6 hours for its next hit and I can get some good sleep most of the time. However, the past week or so has been especially challenging for me, and it's sort of puzzling. I am not under any more stress than normal, work has been better so far in August than it was in July, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming Labor Day weekend, but...there is this sense of...doom? dread? Something like that lurking just around the corner. Mind you, there's stuff coming up that I'm not completely crazily enthused about like the beginning of repayment for our student loans and the like, but it seems like it's something...more than that.

Could it be that I watched not only Gone Girl for the first time this weekend, but The Lovely Bones too? Both are amazingly well-written and well-acted films, and both are very fucked up and not movies I ever need to see again. There's probably 15 or so movies on the "This is great and I will never ever have a desire to watch it again" list, and these two were just tacked onto that.

It is, I think, that everything is finally reaching a critical mass point and coming to a head one way or another.

Last week, while we were out and about, Daisy's car (read: the only car we have) began shaking violently at the steering wheel.

Now, mind you, this could be any number of things, and I told Daisy as much -- being a car guy, I know these things. "Tie rods, tie rod ends, bushings, upper or lower control arms, power steering controller, the steering box itself, tires, brakes, alignment..." I said, trailing off. "None of them are without a significant cost for a car that is now nearing twenty years old."

This is correct; our Sonata is a 2009 model. It's seventeen years old. Daisy has had it since before we were together. We celebrate being together for fifteen years next summer, so...

Anyway.

Daisy made an appointment with our regular car repair folks, who have worked on the family's vehicles for many years. She dropped the car off on a Wednesday morning and was immediately told that the lead mechanic at the shop had quit, and the only one there working on any of the customers' vehicles was, well, the guy she was talking to.

Look, we both work from home, we don't plan to have any medical emergencies anytime soon, and all of the cats have had their shots and medical visits for the year unless some shit goes really wrong. So, Daisy was very caring and sympathetic with him and was like "That is fine, take your time, we don't have anywhere to be or anywhere to go, I can pick it up in a few days."

And honestly, we kind of forgot about it in the hubbub of everything else going on as of late. Work for both of us has been busy, but not crazy -- I have, again, not really gotten an amazing amount of rest, and therefore have been a bit crabby or frazzled here and there, and we've been dodging severe weather forecasts off and on, but getting a lot of rain -- which kills chances to mow the grass when the temperature goes down enough to do it without dying of heatstroke.

Add to this we were still nervous about Charlie as well, and it was the perfect storm of "we can only deal with one BS thing at a time, please" stress that I loathe and dread having to deal with.

The next night, the mechanic called Daisy back, late -- as in, I was already working for the night -- and told her that the car had a number of issues. The steering wheel shuddering was caused by the front tires being absolutely shot and basically peeling off the car. Now, mind you, this was not surprising to me -- I had told Daisy for at least a year or more that the tires desperately needed to be replaced. I told her we needed to just make an appointment at Discount Tire or someplace and just get it done as it wasn't really something we could wait on. But, that wasn't the only problem. The rear passenger wheel bearing was going out as well, and that also needed to be taken care of. He wasn't sure whether the front passenger one needed to be replaced as well, but it also sounded loud.

The tires would be $300 parts and labor and the wheel bearing, to replace it, was another $300. It would also need aligned after the work was done. Daisy looked at me for the answers. I nodded.

Now, look...I drove my Monte Carlo for years on dying wheel bearings and nearly bald tires, but that was because I had to at the time. I did not have much of a choice, I had to have a vehicle that would run and move regardless of whether it did so safely or not. But, Daisy I never want to have to go through that, and roll the dice on risk. Add to this that we are not dying or destitute -- as much as we may have to juggle bills and budgets at times, we do both have good jobs and we are people of means. So, I nodded, and told her to go forth with having everything done.

The next day, Daisy got the call that the car was ready. The tires and wheel bearing had been replaced, and all was well -- however, he was correct in that the front passenger wheel bearing was growly as well, and when he was up under the car, he found that the struts are completely shot. To do the work to fix the other wheel bearing as well as replace the struts, he gave us the fair warning that it would be well over $2000, and it could be done if we wanted to, but likely for a car of that age, it wasn't worth the money. Not doing the work on those things won't kill the car, at least not immediately, and I'm getting to the point with the Sonata that I got to with the Monte Carlo and my Silverado -- if it doesn't kill it then we drive it until it dies of natural causes. So, we declined to have more work done on the car and just took it home. It does drive, steer, and ride far better than it has in years, but it is very clear that this is a vehicle that's on its last legs, and Daisy and I have discussed this at length.

I know a lot about vehicles. You may or may not know this about me already; it depends on how long you've known me and how closely you've been paying attention over that time. I am, as mentioned above, a car guy. I know a lot about what vehicles to buy and not to buy, I know about reliability and safety ratings and gas mileage and reviews and customer experience. I not only subscribed to Car and Driver and Motor Trend for several years, but I am a huge fan of Top Gear and am a longtime watcher/subscriber to Youtube channels such as Vice Grip Garage. Trust me when I say that, for the most part, I really do know what I'm doing and that my automotive viewpoints and opinions should be disregarded at one's peril.

That being said, I've got Daisy on the ropes and am almost ready to deliver the knockout punch (um, er, proverbially speaking) on us getting a newish Ford Bronco Sport as our next vehicle.

We have experience with the Bronco Sport. We had one last fall in Nova Scotia as our rental car for our trip up there. There are few more capable, beautiful and spacious but all at once barebones and utilitarian little trucks I've ever been inside. I fell in love with the Bronco Sport we had for the brief week we had it. Was it perfect? No, of course not. No vehicle will be. But, was it something we could absolutely see ourselves owning and really enjoying? Yes.

A used one from 2022, 2023 at this juncture is anywhere between $20k and 25k. Which is not bad. New vehicles are a scam, y'all. If you absolutely must have a new vehicle, understand that you're just doing it for your own neuroses/psychological reasons. Certified and refurbished used vehicles are perfectly fine, fam.

The Bronco Sport is not the only vehicle I've had my eyes on. I've shown her some Subarus (Outbacks and Foresters) and some Honda CR-Vs, Toyota RAV4s, etc. There's even a few little Nissans and Mazdas that I've kind of been interested in but haven't really done a lot of research on. I've already told her to get the idea of anything Jeep or any General Motors-based SUV out of her head, because they will absolutely be junk and will fall apart, and while I would've trusted Hyundai/Kia a decade ago, not these days -- not with the track record I've seen with a lot of their stuff over the past five years or so. Daisy's parents had a Hyundai Santa Fe -- it was barely ten years old when it blew its head gasket and destroyed the engine. Out of the blue, with no warning and no prior major problems. I told Daisy that experience alone, seeing them have to deal with that, would turn me off to anything from Hyundai post-2012 or so.

Daisy is open to it, especially as we have an end-of-life timetable on the horizon for the Sonata. She does not want to junk it or trade it in; it could and frequently would be useful to have two cars around the house again, like we had in the old days -- though I can tell you I don't like driving the Sonata. Don't get me wrong, I can drive it just fine and it's a decent point-A-to-point-B vehicle, but there's nothing fun about driving it to me. I don't really fit in it comfortably, I don't like the dashboard design and controls, and everything in it creaks and rattles. Does it function as a car? Sure. For now. But I told Daisy, and she agrees, that the metric of when to look for a new vehicle is whether we would trust the Sonata to, say, drive to Chicago and back again, or to Denver and back again, for a week/weekend trip. And for me, the answer to both of those at this juncture is a resounding no. I trust the car to drive us in and around town and on short adventures (like to the wildlife safari in Ashland, or if we wanted to take a weekend in Kansas City or something). I don't trust it any further than that. And Daisy really doesn't at this point either.

So I guess we're going to be passively looking for a new vehicle over the course of the next few months to a year or so, and when we can, we'll pull the trigger on it.

Anyway, once that crisis cleared, we still had our sweet little Charlie to worry about.

All of the test results, all $600ish of them, came back -- turns out that Charlie is just fat and has allergies, like his parents.

Everything else is clear. No cancer. No heartworm. No feline leukemia. No heart disease or pulmonary issues or anything other than fat and has allergies, maybe asthma.

Our course of action? Get him an inhaler that we give him once or twice a day if he seems particularly wheezy, until hopefully he only needs it once or twice a week, then maybe a few times a month, then rarely if at all. And put him on a diet.

That second part is a lot harder than it sounds.

We have six cats. I don't think any of them are gluttons. Well, not really. They're cats. They enjoy their food. We have four feeding stations in the house for the children -- two small bowls upstairs (one in the hallway, one in the master bedroom) and two gravity feeders downstairs, a large one and a small one. That's it. We give them small cans of wet food on a plate in the kitchen 2-3 times a day, which they all split between themselves. I don't think any of them overeat, and even Charlie I don't think is that fat. Pete in his heyday topped out at 21 pounds and I think Maggie hit 22 or 23 at one point. Pete liked food, but he wasn't a glutton. Maggie absolutely was a glutton. So I mean, we've had a long run of experience in the category of "feeding cats."

But, the fact remains that you can't put one of the cats on a diet without putting all of the cats on a diet when they have four feeding stations around the house. To do this in any semblance of the term "diet," it means they must be switched to individual meals. Which, for six cats and with two people who work pretty much opposite schedules, is a huge pain in the ass.

I frankly don't have time to prepare six cats six different meals at different times of the day, nor do I think it is necessary to do so. You can't gauge when cats are going to be hungry enough to eat, and if they're not hungry at mealtime, then they don't eat...because you have to pick up the food when mealtime is over? So that the others don't eat it? It's going to create a lot of hassle, a lot of food anxiety and stress for these cats who won't understand why, all of a sudden, they are being starved, and to me it's absolutely not worth the time or energy to me simply because Charlie is a little fat.

I don't want to traumatize my children, I don't want them to experience food stress or food insecurity (I lived with that myself and it is not fun) and I just can't be pestered by one cat or another 24/7/365 for food because they don't understand where the food went or why they're being punished by not having it available. So, overall, I absolutely hate this idea. It is not going to work and it is going to create far more stress and more problems between the cats in the household than Daisy can possibly foresee, and will likely create stress and fighting between Daisy and myself too. I've tried to work with Daisy on this idea, but I am also very much waiting to say "I tried to warn you that this would not work and you didn't listen" / "I told you so" for all of this. It comes down to optimism versus realism.

August, Part II: The Cats, The Shats, and The Future Trips

2026-08-16T04:40:33.292-05:00

As we continue through August into the fall, I realize that I've been lax about writing on a lot of things here that would otherwise be fully covered were I to write here more often than I do. That is, honestly, on me. On my days off now I generally have a lot to do because it's the only days I can get those things done. As the temperatures begin to cool and we head into fall, my to-do list gets longer as more and more yard work gets added to it.

Add to this that Daisy's work schedule has changed for the moment and she's back on M-F, and that takes Fridays away from us once again. That's good for me when it comes to chores like mowing the yard or doing all of the laundry in the house, but it sucks for spending actual time more than one day a week with my loving wife. She feels that strain too.

So, to those ends, I figured I'd give everyone here a general update on the state of the household and how things are going.

Well...I guess I should start by saying that -- as of right now of course -- we have been very lucky and so far this year, we have not had any severe weather affect us, hit us, or damage our home here in Omaha. It is highly unusual that we don't see at least a few severe storms that are bad enough to make us terrified or cause damage/power outage/internet outages, etc. We've had some close calls, and the tornado sirens have gone off a couple of times, but nothing -- and I mean nothing -- in comparison to some of the worst years of far worse storms we've had in years like 2019, 2021, and 2024. 2026 has been, so far, a blessing for us when it comes to avoiding severe weather. And thankfully, we are now winding down and exiting the true severe weather season for the year. Meteorologists are already talking about snow forecasts for the fall, and have predicted our first snow for the Omaha area for the beginning of the second week of November. This is generally a lot earlier than we get snow. Aside from the first year we lived in this house when we got a freak snowstorm in early October that melted almost as soon as it was finished, generally we do not get our first snow before Black Friday (and, for the past few years, at least a couple of them hit that bullseye exactly). Most of the time Omaha doesn't even have a White Christmas, though there have been multiple years where we have had a very White Christmas. Generally our heavier snows, the accumulating ones in storms and the like, don't come until mid-January through mid-March, and sometimes into April.

This was also part of why I was like Daisy, get me the fuck out of here and to the beach in March when we went to see my parents this year -- by the time we'd gotten to that point, I desperately needed to get away from Omaha cold and snow and be on a Carolina coastline with water lapping at my toes.

My parents have mentioned to us in the past that they want us to come visit in October, which is apparently the best time of the year for their weather and for the town, because all of the tourists have gone home and the temperatures there hit 75 or so at highest during the day and 50 or so at the lowest at night -- the ideal "get outside and actually enjoy North Carolina" weather. And I would really like to do that, of course, but time and money are a factor. I have floated the idea with Daisy of going to see my parents twice a year, once in the spring (like we did in March) and once again in the fall, like they've requested us come down in October. We use our airline miles for the flights, so they're essentially free at this point (for a while, anyway, until we use those miles up) which means basically all we have to pay for on these trips is the rental car and the gas for it, and whatever food and incidentals/shopping we do when we're there. That makes a trip halfway across the country a pretty damn cheap getaway for a few days, with the bonus of being at the beach and spending time with my parents.

However.

Daisy's schedule change at work wasn't just a willy-nilly thing, but part of her taking on a different role. She is not sure whether the PTO she already had on the books for the rest of the year is even valid now, and we'll now have to schedule around both her schedule and mine for doctors' appointments and the like, let alone planning another trip for the fall. So, unfortunately, it really looks like that's not going to happen this fall -- and we should focus on seeing my parents once more in the spring. This is a bit disappointing to me because I wanted to call my parents and be like "hey, surprise, we found some time in October to come see you, like you have asked" and that is no longer in the cards. I'm fine with us waiting until the spring again of course, but the winters in Omaha are long and miserable and sitting here writing this in August makes that time seem very, very far away.

So, there's that.

Truthfully I don't have the time at the moment to request, in advance, for any trips for the rest of the year. I am slowly building up my PTO once more after the trip to Canada in June, and only have about three days available right now. Most of those I'll be using for around the holidays, including whatever else I accrue between now and then. For example, my birthday is on a Sunday this year, so I'll actually have to take it off. Buuuuut I am very much looking forward to Labor Day weekend, which -- as I am taking the holiday this year and the Sunday before it -- will give me a five day weekend next month and some much-needed breathing space away from the grind. Would be nice to go visit my parents during that time, but eh...

What else is going on? Well, we both seem to be doing well on the Mounjaro, and we actually have to set up our next appointments to check in with our doctor for sometime next month. But it does, unfortunately, have some side effects that we have noticed over the course of the past six months or so of being on them, and they hit us differently.

It slows down our digestion considerably -- it's supposed to do that, apparently -- but for Daisy it will slow it to an absolute crawl. For me, it'll slow it down for a couple days, and then...like a cork in a champagne bottle, stuff has to come out. And when it does, I'll, ahem, sit there as it does for about 45 minutes or so.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It woke me out of a dead sleep tonight and I timed it from start to finish. Luckily, I didn't have anywhere else to be or anything else to do during that time.

Other than that, also luckily, I seem to have had no side effects whatsoever from the Mounjaro. However, unfortunately, I have had no weight loss either. My weight has remained almost exactly the same for the past six weeks no matter how much or how little I eat or how much or how little exercise I get. It's very strange. The Trulicity at least, for all its faults and as much IBS as it gave me, at least had me dropping weight like a stone while I was on it. I am going to ask for a dosage adjustment for the next higher level when we go in for our next appointments next month. Yes, I'd like to see my A1C down lower than it was before, but I also want to start losing the weight on this stuff as so many others have. The fact that's not happening is really throwing a wrench into me staying below 300 pounds (since I was last there, I now am back up to 311 and holding anywhere between 305 and 311).

Anyway, moving onward.

We used to be able to say that Hank was the biggest cat in the house, both size-wise and weight-wise. This is no longer the case. We had Hank and Charlie in to the vet today, and Hank tips the scales at 15.1 pounds -- the exact weight he was last summer, with no change. Empress, when we had her in about six months ago, was 15.8 or 15.9. That means that Hank is now in third place in the house, because Charlie is 18.1 pounds.

Today was Hank's yearly appointment for vaccinations and the like, so this was the rote standard for the orange man. He wasn't happy about it, but he got through it.

Charlie, on the other hand, we brought in because we had some concerns about our little flame point boy. When Charlie runs and plays hard, he will pant -- yes, pant -- like a dog. It doesn't even really have to be a sustained level of hard play anymore, but a few minutes. Given that he's a wheezy boy anyway and snorts and snores and has always seemed like he's perpetually had allergies his whole life, normally we wouldn't pay this a lot of mind -- but the panting thing is relatively new. Our catsitter noted that he was doing it whole we were out of town, too, and I know she wasn't playing with them that hard with the wands or the laser pointer.

Our vet, with our permission and instruction, in some cases, ran the full gamut of tests on Charlie and took x-rays of him to see if any problems could be seen. Upon looking at the x-rays, it appears Charlie has an enlarged heart. Now, this in itself isn't hugely concerning -- that same vet said he suspected Hank of having an enlarged heart as well compared to other cats, and Hank is fine -- but we never had x-rays taken of Hank. Charlie's heart is big and appears quite enlarged, but our vet doesn't know at this juncture if that's due to a problem, genetics, or the fact that Charlie is a big boy with a few extra pounds on him.

The blood tests we requested will essentially determine, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether Charlie has a defect, the cat version of heart disease/congestive heart failure, or if he's just fat and has allergies and that's the reason for his wheezy, panting self. We even had them run the test for heartworm, even though the chances of that are very very small. It's a hard three-day wait for the results. In the interim, of course, Daisy is very sad and upset. We just lost Pete at the end of last year, and Charlie is the cat that is most like Pete in regards to how he wants to be held and cuddled like a teddy bear, and loved. When Pete died, Charlie more or less stepped up into that role. Yes, Dolly serves that role too, but Charlie has a deep soul connection with Daisy that is so very similar to what Pete had with her.

Or course, I'm upset too, but I am attempting to remain cautiously optimistic. This is because if the tests come back for heart issues in Charlie, it's essentially a death sentence -- he's got six months to two years, max, before he's done, and that's likely with medications. The heart problem he's being tested for, with a very long clinical name, is the number one cause of sudden death in otherwise healthy-presenting cats. Once cats begin to present symptoms (say, like wheezing or panting when under duress or exercise), you're already in the end game.

All of this, yes, sounds very shocking. And it is. And Daisy is devastated that there is the very real chance that we're going to get some very bad news and Charlie will have a much, much shorter life than we ever expected. There's also just as much of a chance that we'll get the news that he doesn't have anything wrong with him heart-wise and he's just fat and has allergies. I told Daisy that if he has heart issues, it's not like we would've known and it's not like anything we have or haven't done would have been able to prevent those issues -- we can't blame ourselves for it.

If he's just fat and allergic, we do what we can to adjust diet and he likely gets an inhaler (yes, they have those for cats) that we'll give him as necessary. If he presents with actual heart issues, we will need a second scan from a cat cardiologist to fully confirm and he'll have to be on some form of medication for the rest of his life. If we get him on it now, of course, it will help extend his life, but I mean...it's likely overall a losing battle.

The good news is that he does not appear to be on the struggle bus. Charlie is still a very good boy who loves getting attention and love and treats from us. He is still active, he still plays with the other cats and is, honestly, the sweetest boy in the house. He appears to be completely unaware or oblivious to any health issues he has.

Hank, when at the vet, was big mad and looked at everyone like someone had shit in his cereal. I love Hank very much, and I have a very deep soul connection with that orange man, but it is and always has been very clear that he is the orange house loaf and does not like, or want, anything outside his very defined comfort bubble. But, he does appear healthy per the vet; we will likely eventually need to get his teeth cleaned and our vet recommended that we start trying to brush his teeth on a regular basis again (yes, that's a thing), but otherwise, healthy weight and all of his orifices look good. Our vet also remarked that his eyes looked great, and I mentioned that his eyes have been so good that our next appointment for a check up/check in with his eye doctor is November.

As for the other cats? Well, we haven't had to take any of them to the vet as of late for anything, so no news is good news on that front.

Dolly is growing like crazy and is now almost as big as Gary. She has retained her very sweet personality and is incredibly loving. Everyone loves Dolly and everyone gets along with her. The boys adore her, and she frequently cuddles up and/or plays with Emmy and Mable as well. She is nine months old now and I can't wait to see what she'll look like when she's fully grown.

Gary is in his second growth spurt that I've noticed; while he's coming up on his 2nd birthday at the end of the year, as he has the most Maine Coon in the house and they can continue growing until age three or four, I don't think Gary is done yet. He's a sweet, smart boy who always wants to be around us or know where we are, and as of late he's been getting more affectionate with Daisy too -- wanting to climb up on her chest and cuddle, or wanting to sleep with her, etc. It's very sweet.

Mable and Emmy are still in the throes of their sibling rivalry war, which ebbs and flows. Sometimes they'll get along just fine for days if not weeks -- for example, when we came home this morning from the vet they were literally lying next to each other at the top of the stairs, sharing space without fighting about it. Mable has also been letting Emmy come upstairs once more, as most days when I wake up now, Hank and Emmy are snuggled up with me. Emmy has been protecting me at night, too, while I work -- she'll sit on the couch or the floor next to me and will be my guardian.

Mable is...strange. I've always thought she was a very loving, but very weird cat. She is the most sensitive and anxious cat in the house. She will wail so very loudly outside Daisy's office door when Daisy is working, and usually the only thing that will stop that is if I get up, go get her, bring her back to bed with me, and put her on the bed. She will, generally, then calm down and go to sleep. It's not that she wants me, either -- she wants Daisy, and specifically to be in Daisy's office with her. I am merely the substitute father, the spare human.

All of them, however, unfortunately still have some fleas. And Daisy and I are very frustrated about that.

Apparently, according to our vet, the flea medications like Frontline and PetArmor are 99% effective. But, with fleas, it's a numbers game -- if there are 10,000 fleas in the house and 99% of them are eliminated, that still leaves 100 fleas that can each lay 50 eggs a day. Mind you, there are nowhere near 10,000 fleas in our house, but you get the idea. It explains why once every few weeks, Daisy or I will pull a flea or three off one or more of the cats despite them being on the medicine.

So, instead, for the next three months we're going to have the cats on a medication called NexGard (I think that's how it's spelled/stylized). It has a 100% guarantee, to the point where they'll send Terminix to your house to professionally treat it for free if you haven't eliminated the fleas and anything else by the end of the three month period. After that, doc says we can go back to the PetArmor or Frontline as a baseline preventative.

The NexGard is something like $200 a month for all six cats, total. Which is a ludicrous cost, of course, but it is what it is. If it allows us to permanently get rid of fleas in the house and we can go back to our normal preventatives to keep them from gaining a foothold again? Cool with me. A temporary higher cost to be sure, but worth it in the long run.

And since you've made it this far, here, have a new collage of all six:

Top row: Dolly, Hank, Gary

Bottom row: Charlie, Mable, Empress

August, Part I: The History, The Box, and The Plan

2026-08-09T04:16:00.305-05:00

I've always said that there are two months of the year that are bad luck months for me (and in general, but usually for me). One is October, and the other is August. August is a month of events and anniversaries, both good and bad. I am not generally a superstitious man, but I do understand and recognize patterns. August has always been, in many ways, a month of death and rebirth for me.

Let me explain through some example events so that all of you can understand just a little bit better.

Starting from before I was born to set the stage -- August was the month my mother was born, the month she got married, the month my grandparents got married, and (now into the years I have been alive) the month she divorced my father.

August, in West Virginia, was when school started. I was always back in school around the 20th. It was a new, fresh start every year, where I got to show off my new school clothes, new backpack, new Trapper Keeper or haircut. I could fashion a new personality as possible; I could always try to present myself as the person I wanted to be and give myself a new outlook, new style, new anything. In 1995, I was just me. In 1996, I was proud of my football jersey and wore it a lot. In 1997, I had acquired a pair of black John Lennon sunglasses and a tie-dye Star Wars t-shirt, and attempted to make my more laid-back, now a lot more nerdy personality the real me (this, uh, sort of evolved a bit more over the years). But August was other things, too -- it was meeting the new girl in the class, the one from out of town who didn't know anyone and wanted to fit in, or the new guy who had a similar from-out-of-town-story but also played football, so, y'know, he'd fit in fine. It was getting excited for the fall television season, because all the new stuff premiered in August or September back then and if you hadn't seen the new episode of Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine, you would have to get the recap from your friends or wait six months to catch it in reruns.

But, at the same time, it was always a return to the old -- catching up with friends you hadn't seen all summer because they lived on the opposite side of town, trading summer vacation stories, showing off new scabs on knees and elbows and that new box of Magic: The Gathering cards you'd carefully curated over the previous three months. There was something about August that was always charged with positive, hopeful energy. Yeah, returning to school sucked, especially when it was still 90 degrees outside, but this was life.

Then reality began to happen, and suddenly August wasn't hopeful or fun anymore, it was just another reminder of how real, and depressing, the world could be.

In August 2001, my mother and I were rear-ended in heavy rush-hour traffic on a 90+ degree day coming home from work. It did $1300 worth of damage to the car.

A week later, my aunt Eilene died suddenly. Her funeral was the last funeral I've been to where there was an actual body present; other funerals I've been to since have simply been memorial services or the deceased had been cremated, so if they were there, they were only there in ash form. It was also the last time I saw to this day many members of that side of my family in person -- including my actual father, who was brother-in-law to my deceased aunt.

A week after she was in the ground, I started college at West Virginia University as a brand-new freshman. For the next three Augusts afterwards, returning to WVU to start the new year was a bittersweet process. Yes, I still worked there (well, most of the time; I worked my position in Microbiology until 2004ish) every day, but my friends did not -- my friends would go home for the summer, some of them to faraway states, only to return in mid-August to start the next school year. Some of them summarily disappeared from one year to the next -- dropped out, transferred, or otherwise seemingly fell off the face of the planet. Some of them I would never see or hear from again, and after a few years they would begin to fade from memory until they were truly and completely lost.

In August 2007 -- shortly after adopting all three original cats (Pete, Sadie, and Maggie) and moving into a new, much nicer apartment -- I opened this website. So, yes, this month is its 19th anniversary. I started it to write about my experiences working in a grocery store while living in St. Joseph, Missouri between the years of 2007 and 2009, and there were a lot of great stories there. After I left that job and moved to Kansas with my girlfriend at the time, the story and website not only expanded into working subsequent jobs, but also starting grad school.

In August 2010, I started graduate school at Wichita State University. With a brand-new desktop computer, along with a leather jacket and a new electric guitar, I thought I would reinvent myself again. I wore mirrored sunglasses. I grew my hair and beard long. I made, and wore, a lot of tie-dye. I taught English. The students called me English Jesus. I felt like I was part of a community of people again in academia, like-minded people who could appreciate me and really respect me.

I was wrong. I was mostly a joke, at least amongst my peers. And this is where it began crashing down again.

There was nothing like grad school to prove to me that I was not the best at everything I ever did, and more than that, I was looked upon like an idiot poser at most of what I did do well. Make no mistake, as part of our creative writing program at WSU, I did have talent, and I had a lot of it -- it wasn't exactly a competition, but most people in the program saw it that way. It also didn't help that they held an actual competition every year for the best writer from each segment of the program to win a fellowship. Still, at least on the poetry side of things, there were people I could out-poem any day of the week and I was barely trying. Poetry wasn't my passion -- never was, still isn't -- it was a means to an end. I could do it, and some people liked it, and therefore that was enough to get me my MFA. That's all there was to it. Poetry was a steppingstone and a tool.

We'll focus more on this later.

Anyway. I wasn't exactly respected by most of my peers. I had a few great friends there who liked me, respected me, and will be lifelong friends -- but everyone else sort of rolled their eyes at me and dismissed me as a tryhard, or (worse than that) thought I was there simply because my girlfriend at the time was also in the program and I was let in due to nepotism of sorts. This was false, of course; the people making selections for the program do it as a blind process without bias. Still, it seemed awfully convenient.

In the beginning of August 2011, for the first time in over six years, I was a single man again and was starting a new life alone in my rented house in Kansas -- and, summarily, I revamped and completely overhauled this website. The first four years of posts were archived and deleted, and eventually turned into a book that I sold on Kindle for about a month before the few people who bought it reported major technical formatting issues with its manuscript. I took it down for a re-edit, which never happened...and it's been shelved ever since.

In August 2014, after a few months of being unemployed after our wedding, I started the first iteration of the job I am working now, and thus...began soakin' up paycheck once more.

In August 2024, after some of the worst storms we ever had, we were without power for over three days and lost probably $500 worth of food from the fridge and freezer.

So that brings us to the present day, August 2026, where I sit shirtless at my desk at 2:23 in the morning, with a reapplication of purple dye in my hair that needs to sit for another two hours before washout. I am 43 years old. I have been married for over twelve years, own six cats, and have diabetes. Our car is seventeen years old, is rusting in the wheel wells, and needs four new tires on it, but who has the time or the money? I work from home, as does my wife, but we own our home, so we have that going for us. We have an electric lawn mower and our doormat says GO AWAY in big letters on it.

I don't think that August is necessarily bad luck for me anymore (though, now that I've said that, we'll see what happens this month -- 2024 wasn't kind to us) but it certainly isn't a month of new beginnings or excitement anymore. It is a month where I have learned, over time, to appreciate the more peaceful and adult parts of life -- fall weather slowly moving in, football season coming up, being able to work outside in the yard without dying of heatstroke, etc. I am in my 40s now. Were I to stop dyeing it, you'd be able to see a lot more of my gray hair. I'm at the age where I no longer need excitement or new beginnings; I want peace and quiet and harmony instead.

This summer, but especially the past several weeks, I've gotten back into my hobbies. I'm once more archiving things again -- this time mostly movies or TV series that I'm digitizing and saving to a 4TB portable hard drive. Some of it is stuff I've had on disc for a while, other times it's series or movies found on the web over the years. For my nephews, for Christmas this year, I'd like to give them a 500GB portable hard drive full of all the stuff I grew up watching back in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. I have titled this The Retrodrive Project and I'm nowhere near done with it, but it will be something that continues for some time over the course of the next few months. I don't think they'll be in town this year for Christmas anyway, so it may be shelved for another year once it's completed.

Of course, I'm not doing it for just the kids, I'm doing it to keep myself busy and to sort of dissociate from the terrible world we live in, and to either watch or rewatch the stuff that was on the TV or in the theaters when I was a young kid, teenager, or (sometimes) in college. Some of it is reliving through nostalgia, and some of it is how did I let this slip by me when it was on television? Two examples: Top Gear, which I'd never really seen up until recently, and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Both of these shows I'd seen in passing, of course, while they were airing -- never paid attention to them at the time. Now, as a much older adult, I am realizing how great Top Gear was as a series for and in its time, and while I remember flipping through channels and seeing episodes of Brisco County on TNT as a teenager, I never sat down and appreciated what an entertaining show it is until now. The 4TB drive I'm using for it all is about halfway full, and I call it The Box. Eventually, the box will be full, and if my drive for nostalgia is not sated, I will need to purchase a second Box.

So much of adult life is trying to feel something, to recapture the feeling of youth, or to find something to actually enjoy -- because everything else about being an adult, especially a middle-aged adult, fucking sucks so hard. Music doesn't hit me as powerfully as it used to anymore, or it sounds different -- I could swear that so many songs I loved went harder -- I don't know how to explain it other than that. When I hear them today I'm like "no, that guitar should be louder, harder, faster -- is this a remastered version? Is this a re-recording off of some greatest hits album or something? This isn't the real one."

But it is, usually. It is. The past burns so much brighter the further away it gets in the rearview mirror.

So, with time escaping us all more by the day, I came up with a plan.

At heart, I am a writer. That means I need to get my stuff written down, and I need to get it published and out into the world. I've worked actual jobs long enough, serving other people, companies, and corporations. No more. It's now time to make this writing thing my real job.

The "plan" is the framework and a timeline of getting things I've written already and are currently writing now out into the world. And it starts, of course, with things I've already written. That means my poetry collection from 2013 that I used as my thesis gets a slight re-editing if/as necessary and gets professionally published as a chapbook -- likely on Kindle only and it will very likely bring in no real money whatsoever.

Next is the book I created from the original version of this website -- all 400ish pages of it. It will need to be re-edited and pared down, re-crafted into only the best content that suits the book (back in the day I was quite sloppy in the edit and rushed to get it to print, so to speak). Once that's done I will re-release it, likely also on Kindle only.

Having those two to point to, then comes my first actual short story collection, the one I've been working on for several years. That in itself needs to not only be finished, but completely re-edited so that I can get it the way I want it and have the stories in it flow into one another. There are plans within plans for this and what I'd like to do with it and how I'd like to accomplish those goals change almost by the day, but the important part is that this is the first one that I initially want to shop around to potential presses. I'd need more than one hand to count the number of friends and colleagues I know who have successfully gotten their own books published (some more than once) and I will swallow my pride and consult them for advice as possible, also seeing if there are, say, contacts they could introduce me to in order to help make this happen. If not, Kindle store.

After that comes the second poetry collection of all new poems. I have a goal for this, and that goal is to make this a true, honest to God (just a figure of speech here) new full collection of 100ish poems. Not a chapbook, but a full-on collection. Surprisingly, this will likely be the easiest task of the entire list for me. Writing poetry seems to be remarkably easy for me. Am I the best poet in the world? Hell no. Am I objectively better than a lot of poetry I've read over the years by people far more well-published than me? Yes. I think so, anyway. I'm sure other people will think so too. So, a new collection of 100 or so should only take me 6-8 months at most from start to finish and I could probably get it done in half that time if I was bored and didn't have anything else to do. This one I'd also want to shop around to presses; it's about time I have a poetry collection on actual bookstore shelves for people to stumble across and purchase.

These are the hard and set plans, of course. I have much more than this written down and hanging in the balance for when the above either goes well or goes tits up. That includes a book of family ghost stories, a book about the cats, and at least three more themed collections of short stories -- plus a screenplay and a few novels/novellas that I need to finish fleshing out the plans for.

I'm not one of those people who just wants to write one Great American Novel™ -- one story to get it out of their system, to feel accomplished. No, I have so many stories in me. I feel like a Stephen King or Dean Koontz -- I could put out a book or two every year if it's all I was doing. I feel the great need to get these tales out of me and onto the page.

It's a very lonely life, though. Daisy has told me that anytime I want to write and need her to leave me alone so that I can, just tell her and she'll let me. Well, if I were to do this, I'd be telling her that a lot. Writing is, in itself, a lot of work, and it is time-consuming. When I'm really in the groove of it, I can sit there and write for eight or nine hours straight and not realize how long I've been doing it when it's all said and done. About 15 years ago, I got an idea one night to write a Grad School Survival Guide of sorts -- a humorous book for kids starting grad school who didn't know what to expect. I was way into the idea, and in one night, again, one night, I wrote approximately 150 pages of it. Single spaced. I don't know how I did it, but I can tell you I can, absolutely, do it.

No, no drugs were involved. I lived in Kansas and had no money, made $8500 a year as an adjunct professor, and didn't even have functioning air conditioning. I couldn't afford drugs.

So yes, there's a plan. I don't know how it's all going to work. Is it partially spurred on by watching my cousin become an author and reap the spoils of it? Yes, I'm sure it is. But I've also had these plans for a while. It's just time now to put them into motion and actually try, because I am not getting any younger.

July: Gus, Gretchen, Pile it On, and Daddy Spaghetti

2026-07-31T10:41:00.000-05:00

Weeks start and end incessantly, and three-day-weekends disappear in a blink, and before you know it you are more than halfway through July and, as such, in the midst of summer with not much to show for it.

I realize that my story of our Canada trip probably left a bad taste in your proverbial mouths (it certainly did in mine) so I'm going to try to turn this around somewhat and move into more positive territory. It has been a month since we returned from Canada, and I must say that I do really miss it. However, I may miss the idea of it more than actually being there. I sort of miss the independence that traveling up there seems to provide. I miss the sea air, the fresh coffee, the giant gulls in every parking lot. I miss seeing the seals sunning themselves on the rocks only to whip themselves quickly back into the ocean when they see you're watching them.

They're tracking several great white sharks (read: sharks that scientists have tagged) around Nova Scotia this month, some of them around the mainland and some of them up around the island. What a thrill it would be to see one. As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty sure I've seen sharks up there, fins moving through the water and not dolphin fins, and there was a little twinge of excitement there.

A lot of things, little and big, have happened in the past month. A lot of them have come and gone with little fanfare, while others have been big events that have lingered for days or weeks at a time. I'm going to try to cover a lot of it as I can, in a go-with-the-flow manner from subject to subject.

I should probably start with the bigger things the first of which is that both of Daisy's parents have had relatively important, major-ish surgeries since we've returned home. Yes, they're both fine now and have recovered normally, but it's a continual reminder that we are all but mortal and pretty soon (well, relatively speaking) neither her parents nor mine will be around at some point. And I have a feeling it's going to be a blink of the eye in relative time before that happens. We cherish time with Daisy's parents, and we make a special effort to visit mine in North Carolina every year as well. I'm getting to the point where it's so relatively inexpensive to go visit my parents in North Carolina that I am floating the idea of doing it more than once a year -- like once in the spring, once in the fall sort of planning. Daisy and I would, of course, need to work out the logistics of that a bit better, but as my parents have said that the best time to visit is October, and we had a good time and it was warm enough when we were there in March, it's not exactly out of the question to try to plan two trips a year for about 4-5 days each time.

However, there's a bit of a wrench that has been thrown into any planning for that at this juncture, because starting next week, Daisy has a six-month promotion at her job. I call it a promotion because it's not a lateral move, really, but it is temporary. She's entering a program that is the stepping stone to higher-level leadership and/or other segments of her company. Once that program ends in six months, she'll either return to her old position with a higher-level skillset, or she will move to a higher tier (for lack of a better term) within the company. There's not really much, if any, real difference in pay (there's a slight difference in her bonuses) for this time period, but there is a change in schedule -- she is back to a Monday-Friday schedule, which means we won't have Fridays off together anymore. Friday has always been our day to take care of errands, shopping, doctor's appointments, etc. So, at least for the next six months, that's going to suck. She did, however, point out that on Fridays I'll have more me-time to decompress since she'll be working. However, I'd much rather have the time with her. I got so used to spending Fridays with her that it's going to be sad. It also means that she'll be able to watch football with me on Sundays once again though, which I'm sure she's thrilled about. Sarcasm intended.

My own job has been brutal. July has not been kind to us, and I have -- psychologically and motivationally -- been having a very hard time. It is very difficult for me to get up every day and boot up that laptop every night knowing it's going to drive me a little closer to having a mental breakdown, because of the abuse I'm about to face for ten hours straight. I am not exaggerating here, nor do I want to. Next month I cross twelve years at my job (relatively speaking; it's been doing the same job as a contractor for the same corporate overlords through three different companies, but it's the same job) and I've now finally gotten to the point where any care, drive, ambition, or aspirations I once had are just gone, and I am really just going through the barest minimum of motions every single day for the hours I'm there until I can logout and close my laptop. And at this point I am sure people are noticing, but I also...don't really care, to be honest with you. Fuck you, pay me.

We are so horribly overworked and understaffed that the people who work there have been quitting left and right, and that includes one of the girls on my team...my team of four people, which means our staffing was cut down by a full 25% in one fell swoop. Now, mind you, she was my least important employee and I could have been justified in firing her a long time ago for being lazy. However, I didn't want to fire her. I couldn't fire her; she was a warm body I could assign tasks to. I just wanted her to do her fucking job. She did not want to do that, and when it was clear that she didn't have a say in the matter, she was like "okay, well, here's my two weeks" and was gone. Her replacement was a guy I am only passingly familiar with from the day shift teams, who -- in his first two weeks on 3rd shift -- had his laptop spectacularly self-destruct on him and then, once he got a new one, three days into the week had his cat die mid-shift. So, it's been...shaky, to say the least. I have some confidence in him, but full judgment is reserved until bad shit stops happening to him and he can work a normal week without a crisis.

But, I will tell you, my job is not my life -- and, especially that one, it never will be. When I am off shift, I do not give a single flying shit about what happens when I'm not there. Not my monkeys, not my circus. We're not a big happy family. We're people there doing a task that we get paid for.

Still, I get older every day, and each day is a cold reminder that I have never done and likely never will do what I would like to do with my life.

But, apparently, my cousin can.

In a development that came shockingly out of left field, about a month ago I received a text from my mother asking me if I knew my cousin had written a book.

I did not, of course.

The cousin in question is one of the youngest cousins of my generation in the family from West Virginia, born in 1986 -- so, I guess, he is 40 this year. I remember seeing him in the hospital when he was born, so, I mean, I am a few years older than him. Only two of my other cousins are younger than he is.

Now, this cousin...he is absolutely the last person in the family I would have ever expected to write a book. I have always known him to be more on the redneck side of the family (and I say this with no real offense intended, but keep in mind I was a professor and now work in a highly skilled tech job, and the two cousins younger than him are also schoolteachers -- having gone into education as a personal choice).

So my first question was, of course, a book about what? This is the cousin who invited me to join a Facebook group promoting his self-run business, which is killing coyotes for fun and profit in rural Pennsylvania (they are quite the nuisance there to pets and livestock). He invited me to this group, the vegetarian married to a vegan, who loves animals and owns six cats...to a business page devoted to killing animals. I'm guessing he either invited his entire friends list, or he really doesn't know me as a person these days.

Of course, I also have not spoken to this cousin, personally, in well over twenty years. I've been living here in the midwest for twenty years this fall, and I think the last time I saw him was a few years before that at a holiday family dinner, so... maybe he's a different person now than the goofy kid I knew growing up. Regardless, I was curious about his book. Was it a book about hunting? Being republican? (I'm only guessing here, going with the odds) A humor book? A travel narrative? I know this guy married young and has a wife who adores him, the sister of family friends, and I know his side of the family is religious, so maybe it was a faith-based narrative about love and Jesus or something.

It...was not.

I found the post on Facebook about it -- written by his wife -- and then I clicked through to the book itself on Amazon to see what it was all about.

It's a sci-fi supernatural thriller about a ghost/monster hunting detective.

What. The fuck.

Not only that, he has another book that is about -- by the way it sounds -- a werewolf hunting two men in a forest.

What in the everliving fucking fuck.

I was speechless and needed to take a few minutes for myself.

Not only is my cousin doing the exact thing I got two different college degrees to do, but he is doing it on his own, with what appears to be some help in the art department (I must admit, the art for the covers looks great) and has not one but two books written in a similar vein/genre as the style of fiction I write and have been working on for years -- well, in a roundabout way -- and not only has them available on Kindle but has his own full author page and has hardcover/softcover versions too.

I was, and still am to some extent, stunned.

So, I have Kindle credits. I save them -- you can earn $3 towards digital purchases if you choose no-rush shipping on a lot of stuff on Amazon, and if I order something I don't need immediately, I just set it for that no-rush shipping and rake in $3 for each qualifying item. Over the course of any given 2-3 month period, I'll rack up enough digital dollars to where I can buy an album by an artist I like, or will be able to get, say, the next volume of Absolute Batman or Absolute Superman digitally once it's available. It is very rare that I ever spend actual dollars on Kindle content or music, is what I'm saying.

I figured, okay, what the hell, like if he's doing it, I may as well support his endeavors. I purchased his new book, the one he just put out about the ghost/monster hunting detective -- which is the first in a series, apparently.

And then I summarily forgot about it for a couple of days.

Now, Daisy shares my Kindle account because we share a Prime account. This is also because I bought both Kindles at the same time and they auto-registered to me as the primary on the account. So, anything I've bought or downloaded for Kindle she automatically has access to on her own Kindle. I've bought some Supergirl collections on there (for me, of course) that I've also encouraged her to read, for example, as I think she'd really enjoy them.

So a few days later, I tell Daisy this story from the beginning, and I add that I had not read it yet or even opened the book file, but my off-the-cuff suspicion was that my cousin had gotten AI to write this book, or had written a really rough version and had put it through AI chapter by chapter to punch it up and make it sound professionally written -- solely because he was absolutely not the person I would ever expect to write anything like this, let alone in this genre.

"Let's see," Daisy said, opening the Kindle app on her phone. She navigated to the book, opened it, and read a page or two of it silently.

"Well?" I asked.

"...I don't think it's AI at all," she said. "It really feels like a person wrote this."

I opened it a day or three later and read the first pages. Daisy is right. It does not sound like an AI wrote this book, or even really punched it up -- at least not from the scant few pages I'd read. I'm not sure it's a writing style I like or mesh with, but it doesn't seem to be written by a robot, at least.

Somehow that made me feel even worse.

Like, make no mistake, good on him. He put up a post on Facebook about how he has wanted to do this for so many years and now his dream is a reality, and he thanks everyone who has supported him and bought the books and cheered him on throughout the process of getting them done, and honestly I am happy for him. I am still stunned, but, you know, good for him. He gets to live his dream. I don't even care if it's all or half AI or all genuine. At this point it doesn't matter to me.

I think I've come to the conclusion of, essentially, I am not in competition with him. And I'm absolutely not, because I have never done anything commercial with my writing and have never had the opportunity to do so. But even if I had, or even if I do, eventually, get to publish the short story collection(s) I've been working on for years, I am not in competition with him. I wouldn't be doing it to be like "oh look at me, I can do this too" but I'd be doing it because, again, I've spent my entire life trying to be a writer only to have that dream be derailed, over and over, by needing to have an actual job to survive and pay bills. Over the years it's come down to well Brandon, what do you want more? would you rather have six cats and a lot of food in the house and a giant t-shirt collection, or do you want to barely survive and be miserably broke? And sadly the former has won every time.

That's not to say that my writing hasn't gone anywhere. Daisy encouraged me tonight to start on that short story collection I'd been talking about.

"Start?" I said. "I've got four or five stories anywhere between 60-80% finished, but what happens is I'll get that far and run out of steam, and then I won't have the energy to come back to them and finish them for weeks or months, and then the spark is gone and I have to fight to try to get it back...which sometimes, most of the time, does not happen."

This is the most accurate description of this process I can really explain, honestly. When I have the spark for it, the drive for it, the energy for it....there is no stopping me, and I can write for eight, twelve, sixteen hours at a time, barely stopping. When I don't have that creative spark or energy? It can't be forced. And nothing I can do will make that spark happen.

I will be struck by inspiration sometimes, and I do have good ideas that I scramble to write down before I forget them, and then come back to refine them later. Grand plans, however, don't always translate into actions -- we all know that.

Anyway.

While we were in Canada, the catsitter had told us that she'd heard strange noises from our porch, under our back porch, against the house, etc.

"It's the groundhog," we told her, matter of factly.

Gus, as we have named him, has either lived under our porch or has made our backyard his stomping grounds for a few years now, off and on. Sometimes we'll see him every day for weeks on end, and other times we won't see him for many months and then suddenly he'll pop back up again. He's very cute, he's about the size of one of our smaller cats (I'd venture to say he's larger than Dolly, for example) and we've coexisted peacefully for, again, multiple years.

"It sounds like he's tearing up your deck from the underneath," the catsitter told us. "Like gnawing at it, biting at it."

Now, mind you, I have never heard that. I have heard him moving around under the deck -- it sounds very similar to someone walking across the deck -- but I haven't seen or heard anything I would classify as destructive. And the deck itself does not appear to have any damage to it.

Still, this made us a little apprehensive. You wanna live here and eat the weeds in the yard, sure, fine, but if you start destroying our house? You gotta go, son.

We looked up some groundhog deterrents -- apparently cayenne pepper is a big one. Put it around their living areas in abundance, and they'll get the fuck out.

Yeah, Gus didn't care. He would look at Daisy all terrified from under the deck, apparently, when Daisy was spreading around the pepper, but it does not seem to have deterred him in the least. But, I will say, I also haven't heard him doing anything to the deck other than moving around beneath it since we got back from Canada, so if it deterred him from tearing it up, I'm all for it.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago when I heard Daisy exclaim, from the kitchen, "OMG there's two of them!"

I came out to look, and sure enough, next to Gus in the backyard is a smaller, slightly lighter-colored groundhog that clearly appeared to be a female (though I don't know, maybe in groundhog physiology the males are smaller and the females are larger).

Well, there ya go. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, the smaller female, which we've named Gretchen, has a little distinctive white spot on her face that also lets us tell her apart from Gus. She also likes to waddle back and forth across the porch around 6:30 in the morning, which gives Gary fits. Rarely do we see them in the backyard together most days, but we can tell them apart when we do see them out there individually. Neither appear to have been deterred by any of the cayenne pepper or anything else Daisy has tried to put out there, but also we don't hear or see them tearing shit up, so we have a live and let live policy, I suppose. Mind you, our deck and house are built on concrete slabs, so it's not like there's a lot they could really do to cause real damage. Now that I've said that, of course....

We have been trying to keep ourselves on a budget and relatively in-shape as pertaining to our actual health and routines. This does not mean exercise necessarily, but it means we don't really spend money on food or items we don't need and we are trying to eat what's in the house and cook creatively, especially when it's 100+ degrees outside and it's too fucking hot to run the oven(s).

The cyclospora outbreak has had us on edge too -- we have an entire five-pack of full heads of romaine in the fridge that we picked up from Costco legit the day before the news of the outbreak came out, and we're too paranoid to eat it now. Add to this that if I wanted to, and I have wanted to a lot over the course of the past few months, I could eat an entire bag of Taylor Farms chopped Caesar salad in one sitting a few times a week. I could live off that salad if I had to. And now, well, Taylor Farms means until we get some sort of all clear, or we're otherwise told that salads are no longer a threat, I have to go without.

I told Daisy that I am happy to live off what we have in the house, but, to do so...well, I have to get more grocery staples to add to stuff we have in the house.

"That kind of defeats the purpose," said Daisy.

"No," I said, "it doesn't. We have fifteen jars of spaghetti sauce and yet we have no spaghetti. So I would need to get spaghetti in order to use those. As an example."

I did get four giant boxes of spaghetti delivered to me from Walmart yesterday. As all of the cats watched me put it away, I told them "just call me Daddy Spaghetti."

Because, of course, they understand English and will find that amusing, right?

Anyway.

I just like having all of my ducks in a row when it comes to having supplies on hand and having food in the house. At the same time, the Mounjaro has made both of us digest food so very slowly, and as such, we are generally eating a lot less than we did before. Daisy has lost something like twenty pounds, but she is also experiencing some sometimes serious gastrointestinal issues from the Mounjaro. I have lost zero pounds on the Mounjaro, but I am only experiencing mild gastrointestinal side effects at best. What I can tell you is that I have almost zero appetite compared to before. When I am hungry, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and after about 1/3 of the amount of food I used to eat, I become full or start to feel queasy.

So, I mean, I guess that aspect of the drug really works well. I just want to actually start losing weight on it. I know it's working to control my diabetes and lower my blood sugar/A1C, but goddamn do I want the weight loss side of that coin too. Daisy says she's read studies that some people don't start dropping weight on it until they reach the higher levels (7.5mg and above; I am at 5mg now), but after seeing the side effects she's had from it at 5mg like me, I'm slightly terrified to see if the same, or worse, would hit me at higher levels too. I had to discontinue the Trulicity because, essentially, it gave me terrible IBS. While I don't seem to have any major side effects yet, I do know that I am at least somewhat prone to them.

What I do have, however, is a hemorrhoid.

This happens about, oh, once every year or two for me. I'll have a flare up, I'll drink a ton of Metamucil and drink as much extra fluids as possible, and within a few days it'll gradually go away. This time it is taking its time and being, well....a real pain in the ass.

Pun intended.

So that's what's happened in July. Time to move onward now, into August, into football, and into fall.

Finally.

Locked In the Trunk of a Car: Canada 2026, Part III

2026-07-12T04:57:08.838-05:00

Now that the stage has been set and you know where my headspace was throughout the trip and how my mental health was -- for lack of a better description -- rapidly deteriorating, the middle of the week and the middle of our trip up there was Daisy's birthday. And, as she mentioned multiple times, rain or shine she wanted to go to her favorite beach, Inverness Beach, on her birthday.

Well, her birthday rolled around and it was likely the coldest, rainiest, windiest day of the entire trip -- absolutely not the weather you would want to go to the beach in. However, Daisy awoke that morning bound and determined.

"Seriously?" I asked. "I know you said rain or shine, and I know you really want to go to the beach on your birthday, but honey, this really isn't the weather for it."

But there was no talking her out of it. I shouldn't have even bothered to try. I was given the choice of go to the beach with her and Mama and suck it up, or be left at home in the basement with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nobody to talk to when I already felt like an absolute prisoner on this trip. Be a prisoner in the car and then in the rain and cold at the beach, or be a prisoner in a basement staring at the walls.

This is why I did not enjoy this year's trip to Canada. Because it was a lot of choices like this. No upsides, just a bunch of spent calories with nothing to show for it.

But Brandon, you may be saying, can't you just enjoy watching your wife have fun enjoying herself?

Psh, no. I can't. I can try but I end up faking it. I can't enjoy someone else's fun if I'm not having fun myself. I just can't. If that makes me a miserable person, so be it. I was definitely miserable on this trip.

I hate being out in the rain and cold. There's nothing I hate more. I'd rather be out in the snow than be in rain and wind. Snow you can brush off you; rain soaks you to the bone, fogs up your glasses, and is just frustrating.

I promise you I'm not trying to sound like a prick, and I wasn't trying to be one. I was just intensely unhappy throughout the vast majority of this trip. I don't know how much I can stress that, really.

I promise you, this is the face of a man suffering from intense depression on the inside.

So we went to the beach, we picked up a bunch of sea glass and a few neat rocks, and then we returned home. I faked it well. I tried to give Daisy a good birthday, after I was able to get over myself a little bit, but again...it just felt so hollow. It felt like I was getting nothing I wanted on this vacation, and my stress levels certainly weren't being lowered. It felt like Canada was being ruined for me the longer I was there and unhappy. I felt, much like the Tragically Hip song, as if I were locked in the trunk of a car.

That night, not as much because it was Daisy's birthday but because it was the last night with Daisy's aunt and uncle in town with their camper, we all had a big family dinner. Daisy had originally wanted to make tacos for everyone, and we had specifically pre-frozen Trader Joe's vegan soy chorizo and flown up to Canada with it in our luggage so that could happen.

Well, Grandma didn't want tacos. She wanted chicken for everyone. Which was fine for everyone else but me and Daisy, since we don't eat the meats, so on the way home from the beach we had to stop and get alternative vegan foods for the two of us to eat. Honestly I was so tired and frazzled at this point that I do not remember, at all, what we ended up buying and eating during the big family dinner. I really don't. I don't remember much about the dinner at all. I know afterwards I was so exhausted that I went back downstairs to the back bedroom sanctuary and passed out.

Two days later we gathered our things, packed everything as tightly as possible into our suitcases, drove to the airport, dropped off the rental car, and flew home. There was no pomp and circumstance, there was no big production about it, there were no overly long goodbyes or overwrought emotions. I felt battered and numb, upset that I'd really not had a fun time, tired because it was hard to sleep on the basement bed, disappointed that despite my tries on various stations I had not heard the Hip on the radio once during this trip, and I just wanted to be home more desperately than anything else.

When we finally arrived back in Omaha, our luggage had arrived hours before we had and was being held in the office off to the side. Mama and Daisy's luggage were fine, but my suitcase had been beaten to hell and the top handle and luggage tags had been ripped off -- of my brand new, four-month-old green monster suitcase that I'd purchased because my last one had been damaged beyond repair in the same fucking airport.

We took pictures, and upon return home I filed a damage claim the next day. The company that the airlines contracts for their damage claims requested I put it in a box or a bag and mail it to them for repairs.

I declined to do that, mainly because of the likelihood that it will become far more damaged in transit to and from their facilities, and asked if there was just a direct compensation or replacement they could do. Nope. Mail it to them or that's it. So, as that's not happening, I now have a suitcase with a busted handle.

Like, obviously it isn't the end of the world, and it's not ruined without that handle, but it certainly makes moving it around a lot more difficult and I'll need to attach the luggage tags in a different place (may I suggest the holes ripped into it?) but few things irritate me more than stuff like this.

I am on the fence on whether I'll purchase another suitcase at this juncture or whether I'll just get some wire, slip it through those holes, and try to wire the handle back on there by wrapping and fortifying it. If nothing else, or if I can't really travel with it as is, I'll stick it under the bed and it can be used as extra storage for bedding and blankets, because we will always need that.

I need a new travel backpack anyway; the big canvas one I've used for years is wearing out, big time, and its stitching is ripping on the seams and on the straps. Maybe I can get a two-for-one package deal somewhere, somehow.

Anyway.

So, our trip to Canada ended with a whimper. We returned home to six very grateful, loving cats, 90+ degree temperatures every day again, and a return to work for both of us about 36 hours after we got home. And that was that. I will tell you that I am better now; I am no longer out of sorts nor am I miserable, and I can look back on the trip to see the positives on it, but it was very hard to see those positives while I was there.

Two Canadians Plus One American Equals Three Americans: Canada 2026, Part II

2026-07-12T02:44:17.719-05:00

Traveling with Mama is not usually hard, but it is a much...slower experience. It requires a lot of patience and it especially requires you to not be in any sort of hurry to get somewhere or to do something whatsoever, no matter what. Mama has a walker and a lot of mobility issues due to health concerns and just plain old age, and I have always understood that and have never had a problem with it -- in fact, I am generally first in line to jump up and help her do something that would otherwise cause her pain or discomfort.

But, be advised that Canada is very different than the United States in both how they care for their elderly and/or otherwise sickly population as well as in a grand cultural sense. As Mama told us, there are not laws in Canada that say that the handicapped must get special treatment or special parking or entryways into buildings/ramps etc (whether this is true or not, I don't know; I have not looked it up) like there is here in the states, and in general it seems like the Canadians either look down upon or otherwise ignore the enfeebled almost entirely. As such, we have noticed it's harder for Mama to get around in public at places in Canada, and it's much more difficult to get, say, wheelchair assistance in the airport without telling multiple people multiple times in myriad ways that yes, it is absolutely necessary.

This being said, when I travel to Canada with Mama and Daisy, I am traveling with two full-blooded Canadians, women with Canadian citizenship as well as American citizenship. I don't expect to be given special treatment, but I do expect to be treated, well, as a Canadian, even if I am not one, as I am married to one and the son-in-law of another.

But to anyone watching us on the outside, it is very clear that all three of us are Americans. It doesn't matter what flags we wave or how front-and-center my Tragically Hip t-shirt is when I travel -- I stick out as an American. Daisy says it's mannerisms, tone of voice, even body language that gives it away, and even Mama can't hide it now since she has spent so long in the states.

Mind you, we are all American citizens too; Daisy is and always has been a dual citizen and Mama just got her American citizenship two years ago after being here for nearly fifty years (married to Dad, of course, who is also American). Believe me, if I had any actual Canadian blood heritage anywhere in my ancestry or family line that would qualify me to become a Canadian citizen, I would be doing so -- but, sadly, I don't have that. When I travel, especially during this dark era of the Trump Administration, I try not to stick out as an American. I've mentioned this before. However, it's really hard these days, and I don't think it's going to get any easier.

However, traveling with Mama does have its perks -- she takes her handicap placard with her everywhere we go, and we hang it off the mirror of any vehicle we're in and get the best parking in the parking lot every time, for one. For two, we do get to board airplanes first with her, and in airports (especially stateside) if we are far from our next gate/terminal, we have people who will jet us across the airport on one of those go-kart things, luggage in tow, all together because we're traveling together.

In non-handicap situations though it is very clear that we are all Americans when out and about (sorry, I'm talking about Canada here, so it's oat and a boat) either shopping or in restaurants. While Mama will slip back into her Nova Scotia accent a bit when she's there, and I am also one of those people that if I spend enough time someplace, the accent there will work its way into my speech, Daisy is not one of those people (though I do think she could if she let it). However, even for me it takes a while, so any time I open my mouth more than a mumble, it is very clear that I am absolutely American.

So generally I keep my mouth shut in most public places. I'm not making any more waves than necessary.

When we went to Inverness Beach for Daisy's birthday, there's a gift shop on the way that we have always wanted to enter but it has never been open when we've driven by. There's a running joke within the family that it's not open, but it is shut, because that's what the sign says. Not closed, but shut. Well, this time it was open, and we found that it was owned and operated by an American transplant from California who had family in the area. Turns out we're not the only Americans in the area -- especially not up on the island, where a lot of the people there are from the states and have moved there for retirement or to just plain get away from the trainwreck that is the US government.

I don't know how much I really believe that. A lot of the people we see and interact with there are very clearly Canadian, or are naturalized citizens who are clearly immigrants -- I can't say that I see or interact with a lot or any "known Americans" other than us when we're there. Nobody there seems to be overly hostile towards Americans (though if you'd ask Mama, she'd say differently). Also, if you're moving to Canada to retire there? On Cape Breton Island, along the coastline? You have to have a lot of money, because that is not something that is cheap, and it is doubly not cheap for Americans. If it were, I'd already be living there and our cats would be Canadian cats.

This time around, it seemed like the novelty of us coming to town had worn thin or we had otherwise not warranted a lot of attention from the rest of the family, even with Mama with us. I let Daisy and Mama handle communication with everyone, of course -- it's not my family, it's theirs and I just married into it. While there are definitely aunts and uncles and cousins who adore me and who have accepted me into the family as an honorary Canadian as if I was born and raised there and always belonged, it's still not my place to be messaging extended family and being like "hey, we're going to be in town on X days, be there" because not only is that not my place, but I'm sure everyone would see it as aggressively American -- because I certainly would.

Now, I will also mention that our arrival coincided with prom and graduation for one of the younger kids in the family and the one I would call, more than anything else, the "golden child" of the family. Yes, Prom on the weekend we arrived and Graduation on the weekend we were leaving, in late June-- school schedules are very different in Canada. Because of all of this activity surrounding the golden child and the preparations/schedules involved for the graduation party (taking place the day we were flying home, unfortunately), a good chunk of the family we'd normally see -- including said golden child as well her parents and brother and at least two other cousins, we did not get to see. Daisy's other cousin who had the wedding in October was stuck coordinating trainings at work in Halifax all week, and thus we did not get to see the newlyweds either.

Who did we spend time with while we were there? Well...

Daisy's aunt and uncle, the parents of our cousin we saw get married in October, always make a special effort to drive the camper up to the family homestead to see us when we're in town. I love them; they are wonderful people and nobody makes us feel more at home in country than they do. These are the aunt and uncle who have told us point-blank that it's time to escape the states and come home, and when we do we will have a place to stay with them. They came up the day after we arrived and stayed a couple of nights before heading home.

We did see some family friends we always see when we're there, if possible, and we did see Daisy's other aunt and uncle who live next door to the family homestead. However, aside from one of Mama's friends, we saw nobody else while we were there. As mentioned, most of my time was spent in the basement, where I felt trapped and unimportant because nobody wanted to come spend time with us while we were in Canada. The oppressive rain and cold didn't help matters much either.

I was struggling. All I wanted was to have some fun and be happy, to be able to enjoy my vacation and actually feel like I was on vacation, not trapped in a basement while it poured rain for days on end. There were no adventures to really be had, and the parts of the Canada Experience that I'd enjoyed so much in years past just felt hollow and empty. Yes, we would go to Walmart and shop in the vastly superior Canadian Walmart, but...it lacked the charm it had in previous years.

They changed up the inside of the local Tim Hortons, added kiosks and new seating and new register systems, and in doing so made the place far less quaint and inviting and more like an assembly line with furniture. It made me sad. The food and coffee was just as good as always, but still.

Yes, when I am in Tim Hortons, my codename is Duke. Nobody knows me. I'm sure there could be other Brandons around up there. But I doubt they run across a Duke very often. Plus, it's always somewhat hilarious to hear the small, waify foreign (mostly Indian) coffee girls yell out "Duke? Duuuuuuke!" when my order is ready.

Daisy rolls her eyes but I know she gets a kick out of it too. Also, it's pure coincidence that together we are Daisy/Duke. I promise that wasn't intentional.

Aside from the brief social gatherings with people, we treaded no new ground in Canada this year. Did we go to Giant Tiger and Dollarama? Why yes, yes we did. We spent a little money at each place. Did we take Mama to get her fish and chips in Truro? Yes, we did, and I got a poutine there. Did we go to 5c to $1.00 in Antigonish as we do every year? Yes, we did, and just like every other year, I got a new hat there.

Sigh. For some reason, it was just all so...depressing. Sad. I was not having fun at all. I was really, really struggling, I was getting increasingly irritable with everyone, especially Daisy, and there was nothing that could really make me feel better. It got to the point where Mama and Grandma noticed it as well, and the last thing I wanted to do was ruin everyone else's time just because I was miserable, but at the same time I wanted everyone to know that I was enjoying absolutely nothing about this trip.

Looking back on it now, yes, the weather was a big factor in why I felt so badly, but also the fact that we weren't being treated like royalty for our visit and that everything wasn't revolving around the three of us flying in to visit from thousands of miles away was subconsciously affecting me too. Add to this that we hadn't had any adventures planned just for me and Daisy -- we didn't really have any true vacation time to ourselves, everywhere we went and everything we did involved Mama or doing something for Mama or taking her with us, and in those situations I felt very heavily like a third wheel, wondering why I was even there on this vacation with them, because it certainly wasn't for my enjoyment.

Over the span of a few days, this compounded and I was absolutely miserable. There's only so many things you can do to entertain yourself when you're essentially trapped in a basement. There's only so many hours you can read books or watch television on your tablet (a tablet that, in Canada, only has half the apps be functional -- i.e. no HBO Max, no Paramount+, and no Libby library app) before you're like "fuck, let me out, I have to do something different."

But we didn't. We did nothing different. We did nothing adventurous. Daisy and I didn't take a day trip to drive up and down the Cabot Trail. We didn't go whale-watching. We did little more than sit in the basement, and while I fully realize being there, being in another country, is a treat in itself -- this time around it all just rang hollow. I felt like I had become the ghost in the house, not Daisy's grandfather.

The End of the Universe: Canada 2026, Part I

2026-07-05T03:09:41.035-05:00

We have gone to, and returned from, Canada. I know, you've probably been waiting to hear that.

We have been back for a week.

It has been...difficult to write about, and process, since our return, and thus I don't know how much I'm going to write about this trip as a whole or as a documentation of our experiences, because -- and I'm going to be 100% frank and transparent in saying this -- I had a miserable time when I was there this year and felt like a prisoner for a lot of the trip.

I know that this must sound absolutely shocking to you. And it's shocking and sad for me too.

It did not feel like a vacation to me. Most of the trip was not pleasant. We didn't break new ground or go anywhere/do anything new. Most of the family didn't even come into town to see us (most -- some made a special effort to come visit) and a lot of those family who knew we were there were otherwise occupied most of the time and did not make contact or outreach to us while there. It was freezing cold every day and poured rain, and when it wasn't freezing cold and raining I was, admittedly, in a very foul mood.

Were there highlights of the trip?

Eh. I was able to read a lot and I watched a lot of movies and TV on my tablet.

I'll go down through the list of highlights and lowlights, I suppose, by the numbers:

4 different airplanes

3 different airports

2 rental cars

2 poutines from different places

$50+ of Canadian candy bars brought home

2 new Nova Scotia mugs

2 new Canadian souvenir t-shirts

5 days of trips to Tim Hortons

4 uses of my codename "Duke" in Tim Hortons, for pickup orders

3 new pairs of shorts

6 new pairs of socks

2 new retro, thin hoodies

1 new Canadian themed quilt set

2 sleepless nights on an air mattress

1 well-slept night on a bed

2 mediocre-slept nights on that same bed

1 horribly-slept night on that same bed

1 water bottle filled with urine (multiple times, multiple nights)

1 new water bottle purchased for obvious reasons

1 big family dinner

3 days of constipation

5 days of eating sandwiches and ketchup chips in the basement like a goblin

$30+ for a 12-pack of Monster

105 photos taken

0 photos taken that can be used for Christmas cards

1 damaged suitcase

6 cats happy we're home now

I always felt like traveling to Canada was like slipping into a slightly different, much better/quieter parallel universe. This trip felt like we stepped through the portal into a grimy, beatdown truckstop at the end of the universe. I felt like there was some change in the air, some sort of shift into a darker timeline. I don't remember seeing the Canadian summer sun -- the actual, beautiful summer sun of Canada -- the entire time we were there. Some days were brighter or darker than others, but I don't know that I actually saw a sunny day when I was there.

Of course, I was in the basement almost the entire time.

So if I'm going to tell this story, I should probably start with our arrival and what our living arrangements were while we were there. And before I go on I want to state that yes, I was miserable almost the entire time I was there, and when I am miserable it is incredibly hard to hide it. It turns me into an insufferable asshole, and while I am fully aware of this a lot of the time, I am not in control of it. Sometimes, as I apparently was during the majority of this trip, I am not aware that apparently I was being a miserable, insufferable asshole. So as you read through the story of our trip, please keep that in mind throughout -- but also keep in mind that even if I am an insufferable asshole, it does not make me wrong, nor should any of my perceptions be discounted or dismissed.

That being said, let's move onward.

We arrived in Halifax with no issue. The flights were fine, they were actually comfortable, and we had the wheelchair assistance for Mama that we had needed and requested up until we got through customs and were then told, basically, "alright, you American fuckers are on your own" in less words.

Daisy always requests a full-size car for our trips, or a medium SUV. As last fall we loved the new Bronco Sport that we had as our rental, Daisy opted for that again -- a "Ford Escape" or equivalent.

This. Is not what they gave us.

Upon arrival at the rental counter, they told us the vehicle we'd reserved multiple months in advance was not available, and tried to stick us into a Hyundai Kona, which was not large enough to fit our suitcases, let alone the three of us. We declined and told them that we needed something bigger, because not only did we have three giant suitcases but we had our elderly, handicapped mother in tow, and they told us to sit there and wait.

So, here we were, in the basement of the Halifax airport, reliving the situation we'd been in two years ago during the last time we went on this trip with Mama -- waiting there, tired and in pain from traveling all day (with at least three more hours on the road to go before being home at the family homestead) with no rental car.

To be fair, this time around they quickly prioritized us and got us into a new Volkswagen Tiguan, which was large enough for us and our luggage, but...I mean, it wasn't a Bronco.

It was a fine enough vehicle for our purposes, I suppose. I was and still am skeptical of Volkswagens after the rental company gave us a new Jetta two years ago in North Carolina and it had its check-engine light on the whole time we had it.

Well, this Volkswagen was fine, I guess. I didn't think the seats were comfortable at all (but Mama and Daisy did), but I did like -- for the most part -- the way the cabin sat off the ground and the way it was designed. It was more of an appliance than a car, honestly -- the equivalent of a refrigerator with wheels. We didn't need it to be special, we just needed it to get from point A to point B, and it did that without issue.

After stopping for dinner and some light grocery shopping, we finally reached the family homestead as it was beginning to get dark. We brought in everything and went downstairs, where the downstairs great room was almost already prepared for us and where Daisy would set up the air mattress.

So, that bears a little explanation as well -- all of this does, I'm sure.

When we were up there last fall, Daisy's grandmother told us that she'd rather us stay there in the house with her than get a room at the Cove Motel or rent the really expensive AirBNB we rented two years ago. We've stayed with her before and it's been fine. It's not incredibly ideal, but it's fine. The upstairs spare bedroom is cramped and hot, but we manage.

Well, this time we were coming with Mama, and because Mama has limited mobility, that means she gets that upstairs spare bedroom, and we are relegated to the basement.

Now, to be fair, the basement of the family homestead isn't a dungeon or anything like that -- it is furnished, has a kitchen with sink and fridge/freezer, laundry room area with washer/dryer, a workshop (where Daisy's grandfather did leatherwork and built guitars) a back bedroom with a queen-sized bed, and a great room with a couch, piano, TV/VCR/DVD player and Daisy's grandfather's old desktop computer/desk. But, it is not a space that has been occupied, for any real reason, since some time before Daisy's grandfather's passing in 2022. So, it looks like a space trapped in time -- his tools where he left them on his workbench, the CDs and DVDs on his computer desk in the order he'd left them there, the electronics and glassware and everything slowly gathering a layer of dust after years of being untouched.

And of course we bomb down the stairs and begin touching everything again.

Now, mind you, Daisy's uncles have been slowly cleaning out the house, so stuff isn't exactly completely untouched. Grandma also has a home care nurse that uses the downstairs kitchen area/fridge/washer-dryer every week too, so it's not like stuff is falling into disrepair or anyhing. Additionally, Grandma has given the edict that she wants people to clean up the things and get what they want now, so that when she goes there's not a fight about things/stuff/money/property. The woman will turn 93 this fall, so this is understandable. And as much as we'd like to fantasize that we'll be making this trip every year for the next five, six, seven years -- it is getting more likely by the year that each trip up there will be our last. The house is already in the name of Daisy's uncle who lives next door, so whenever it's time, it's time, We won't really have much reason to go visit the family homestead once grandma is gone, of course.

Now, I've been down in the basement a lot while I've been there -- mainly for laundry -- but we'd never stayed down there before. Daisy had come downstairs to sleep in the spare bedroom when it got too hot upstairs during our trip there in 2023, and had said then that the bed wasn't exactly comfortable -- which is why she'd gotten the air mattress. Both she and I have felt her grandfather's presence down there since his passing, and Daisy even saw him once -- this is something she does not like to talk about -- so it's a bit strange compared to if we were staying there while he was still alive.

I will say that last year when we were there in the fall, I did not feel his presence in the house more than the equivalent of a faint, lingering whisper. Previously, when we were there in 2023 it felt like he was still there, in the room with us at all times. This time? I felt absolutely nothing downstairs. The place felt completely empty and lonely with no wisps whatsoever of his presence there. I did not ask Daisy or Mama how they felt being in the house this time around, but, to me -- the man had finally left the building.

Anyway.

Because she knew of the bed downstairs being uncomfortable for her, let alone both of us, Daisy spent months researching air mattresses to purchase, stuff into the suitcase, and take with us to Canada. It needed to be a king-size, it needed to have its own plug-into-the-wall auto inflator/deflator, and it would need to be firm enough to be comfortable yet not too firm to where it would feel like sleeping on a board.

She found one on Amazon that had decent reviews, purchased it, stuffed it into our suitcase when we left, and unloaded it once we got there in the basement.

And it was...awful.

Like, maybe I'm being picky. I'd gone out and had gotten special sheets for the air mattress so that it would feel like some semblance of a bed, and honestly that first night when we had just gotten there after traveling for something like eighteen hours straight...I would've slept on the floor, I would not have cared. So, Daisy inflated it, we put the sheets and a blanket on it, and Daisy passed out on it almost immediately. I joined her and had some trouble, but eventually I slept.

Aside from a short nap the next evening, it would be the only time I ever attempted to sleep on that godforsaken fucking air mattress. It destroyed my back, it made me sweat profusely, and it was near impossible to get on and off of without being catapulted directly into the wall or hyperextending one's knees or elbow joints. It was an absolutely miserable sleeping apparatus that I felt the need to curse with every colorful metaphor in my extensive vocabulary of colorful metaphors.

Daisy was fine with it. She didn't understand why it bothered me so much. She slept like a rock on it every night of the trip.

Starting on night two, I moved into the back bedroom and slept on the old queen-size bed down there. It was old and broken down, but it was an actual mattress. That second night was the best night of sleep I've had on vacation in a long time. Nights three through six were a bell curve on the downhill swing as I perceived that bed to be less and less comfortable each night I slept on it.

The back bedroom itself was interesting, though. It was always more of a spare room, I supposed -- there was an old treadmill in there from at least the mid-80s gathering dust, and all four sets of Grandpa's golf clubs. Yes, four sets of clubs. Back in the day, he was apparently a very well-respected, could-have-gone-professional golfer. The great room, where Daisy was sleeping on the air mattress, was filled with golf tournament trophies on top of the ancient player piano. The closets held every jacket, coat, or weird pair of pants that the old man ever owned, most of them looking like they hadn't been touched since the 90s or early 2000s. I didn't mess with them, though I did look through the racks a bit and I examined a few of the clubs out of curiosity.

The good thing about the back bedroom is that it was quiet, it was private, it had its own door and lighting system, and it was likely the coolest spot in the house even when Grandma turned up the heat every morning (yes, in June). It was also below ground, with the only windows in the room being at ceiling level, and those were, essentially, basement windows. It was also right below the bathroom, and in essence also right below the wifi router -- meaning to get full signal, all my tablet or phone needed was to go eight feet straight up through the ceiling. This gave me, accidentally, the best connection in the house. As such, I made that back bedroom my base of operations -- if I ever wanted to go read or watch something on my tablet, I could, and easily.

Except, well, it was also the furthest room in the house away from the bathroom.

Let me explain. The family homestead has one very outdated, sad little bathroom. It is upstairs on the opposite end of the house from the basement stairs -- as mentioned, the bathroom was right above the back bedroom in which I was sleeping. This meant that for Daisy or myself, when we needed to use the bathroom we would have to walk across the entire basement, go up the stairs, walk across the entire house in the opposite direction, and hope that one of the other three people in the house didn't need to use the bathroom at the same time or weren't already in there.

Add to this that I am a diabetic and I drink a lot of liquids to stay hydrated, and every day/night while I'm sleeping, I get up multiple times to pee. It's just part of who I am now, I guess.

Well, when you're sleeping in a basement with no bathroom and no other options, a 28oz-capacity, dollar-store water bottle with a wide mouth becomes your new best friend.

I wish I were making this up. I knew if I trudged upstairs and made the long journey across the house, not only would I likely wake up everyone on the way there or the way back, but by the time I got back downstairs after a simple pee, I would be wide fucking awake again. It was different when we weren't traveling with Mama and were staying upstairs in the spare room...the spare room that was eight feet across the hall from the bathroom.

So, when nature called, at least for pee, I would roll over and pee in the bottle, cap it/seal it, and then go wash it out in the sink next to the washer/dryer the next day.

Look, I'm not proud of it, but I'm old and in pain all the time and that is a long walk up and down stairs and back and forth across the house just to take a piss. I'm not here for that.

When I had to shit or shower, it was bad enough that I had to essentially take my entire cosmetics bag to and from the bathroom every time because leaving it in there would upset Grandma. Mama and Daisy had to do the same thing, essentially.

This didn't matter much though, because aside from this incident on day two...

...I don't think I had an actual, normal, comfortable shit again until we returned to Omaha. Oh, I had some defecations, yes, but none of them were normal or comfortable.

I correct myself -- I had an explosive shit in a gas station bathroom outside the Halifax airport the day we flew home. That was somewhat normal for me.

Anyway.

So that was the living situation for seven days, six nights. It could have been worse. The downstairs fridge was all ours to use, and we did. The washer and dryer are 30 years old, but they run well and run fast cycles with efficiency. In the basement, we actually have a little privacy too.

Anniversary Weekend 2026

2026-06-05T01:42:00.000-05:00

I will confess that it took me almost a full week to write the previous post here, but I wanted to start June free and clear, and looking forward, onward and upward.

As many of you know (and some of you reading this were actually there to see it happen), the end of May is our wedding anniversary. Yes, twelve years ago in 2014, these two young weirdos got married:

It was a decision that has haunted them every day since.

Anniversary #12 isn't like...one of those big time milestone anniversaries or anything, and I don't even know what the traditional anniversary gift is for a 12th anniversary. Hm, let's check that, while we're here:

Uh...sure. Not doing that, so...onward.

Both of us took the day off work. I had it off because of the way the days fell after Memorial Day -- I worked Memorial Day weekend, so I had a "comp day" I took to make up for that. Technically I could've taken two comp days, likely -- or at least I could have made the argument for it, but I'll wait to pull that card when I sincerely have zero fucks left about that job and will be looking to get out of work or responsibility at any opportunity. On my last day of work last week before I'd be out of office for a four-day weekend, I told my boss that I have now worked four holidays this year -- and that the crew was on their own for the rest of the year when it came to holiday coverage and I've now done four times the required number of holidays for anyone in the company or leadership.

This is true -- our new corporate overlords recognize all of the bank holidays, so Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, and new stuff like Juneteenth and the like are all holidays that our teams are supposed to get off now. I have worked New Year's Day, Presidents' Day, MLK Day, and now Memorial Day this year -- fuck 'em, I'm done for all other holidays.

Juneteenth (June 19) will already be during my time off for the Canada trip, and is a Friday (which I wouldn't work anyway).

July 4th is a Saturday -- that'll be all entirely on the weekend crew to cover; have fun, folks.

Labor Day I will make sure I have other plans for and may take off a few days before and after to do a mini-vacation with the wife.

Veterans' Day is on a Wednesday this year and you bet your ass that'll be a day I take in order to extend my weekend.

Thanksgiving is on November 26 and is always a Thursday, and I don't work Thursdays anymore. I'll absolutely be taking the night before off on PTO to extend my holiday weekend as always -- this is something I do every year, unless for some reason I would need to work on the holiday.

My birthday is on a Sunday (December 20) and Christmas is on the following Friday. Oh man, wouldn't it be nice to just take PTO for that whole week and return to office on Sunday the 27th? I might actually do that.

So yeah. I have this all planned out already.

Anyway, that's a very long sidebar to the story, so let me return to the tale of our anniversary weekend.

For the first time in a while, we had not made any real concrete plans for our anniversary other than "we have it off together, so let's spend time together" and "let's eat some good food somewhere." We like to keep it somewhat loose when we're not going somewhere or doing something on a schedule, and honestly we've both been really burnt out and tired by life as of late.

A week or so before our anniversary, Daisy mentioned (again) that we had not gone to the new iteration of Modern Love -- a famous vegan restaurant in Omaha that had closed up shop at the end of 2024 -- named Fifth House. Fifth House was a new restaurant, a new location, but with most of the same menu and the same kitchen staff as Modern Love had. Essentially it had become Modern Love with a different name, so we were told.

"Let's do that on our anniversary then," I said. "Book us a reservation that day right when they open and we'll go down there and spend a lot of money on a small amount of food."

Yeah, they're not cheap. Vegan food, especially vegan food in the hipster part of town, rarely is.

So Daisy booked the reservation for 11am, opening time, on Sunday morning. Our plans were to get up, eat something small for breakfast, and then to go over there for lunch at 11 as our main meal of the day.

And we summarily forgot about it as it was a week out or more at that time.

The Thursday leading into our anniversary weekend we got pizza from our favorite local place. It was good, but that was also the night that I got the horrific allergic reaction (it happened, and got worse, as I was eating dinner that night).

No, it was not the pizza; I was developing symptoms beforehand and over the course of the following few days I ate the rest of the pizza with zero ill effects. It was delicious.

So, day one of our weekend was an absolute washout because of that allergic reaction -- I took the Benadryl and passed out, as mentioned in my last post here.

The two following days were spent doing chores and running errands. We had to get some grocery shopping done and bills paid (the trip to Canada is, after all, coming soon -- and we must prepare) and Daisy needed to do some work in the yard and garden between days of rain and thunderstorms. I did some grocery shopping and prep work of my own for the trip, which I'll go more into detail on later. Daisy is also back to the weekly schedule of kitten-feeding at the humane society on the weekends, which she started a few weeks ago as we are in the full swing of "kitten season" again.

During this time, I also received and prepared the anniversary present I'd gotten for Daisy.

Now, mind you, she had told me before that she hadn't gotten an anniversary present for me and I told her I didn't care, that was fine, but I'd done something small (very small) but monumentally sentimental, and that she'd find out what it was on our anniversary.

And then we both promptly forgot about it while we spent the weekend running around.

On Sunday morning, the morning of our anniversary, we woke up together and Daisy declared that she'd like us to go to Trader Joe's (for what, exactly, I cannot recall now). So, at what felt like dawn but was really around 9am, we went to do some light grocery shopping. When we returned home, we had juuust enough time to put away the food and change clothes before we had to get in the car for our 11am lunch reservation at Fifth House.

Yeah, remember that?

Well...

Look, navigating downtown Omaha can be challenging even in the best of circumstances. A Sunday morning at 11am is legit what I would call, in most cases, the best of circumstances. Daisy does not classify the area we were going to as "midtown" and not "downtown," and honestly...I label the part of town we live in as "midtown" mixed with North Omaha (we're basically right on the cusp of both) and anything about 10-15 streets east of us as "downtown," including UNO and Creighton campuses and everything else into the heart of the city.

I understand that you won't understand this or care if you don't live in Omaha, and that's fine. My only point is saying that I classify where we were going as downtown. When there are parking garages and skyscrapers around you, you're downtown.

Anyway.

A large chunk of the hipsterish area of Omaha (known as the "Blackstone" district) is under construction right now. They've been working on a streetcar project forever, and a lot of the locals hate it because it is, in their eyes, useless and very expensive, but also because the construction is closing off streets and parking, making it very difficult for some of these businesses to survive. If people can't get to you to eat your foods and buy your wares, you're going to go out of business -- it is simple math.

Well, Fifth House is right in the middle of all of this construction for the streetcar project, and the only real parking was a block away in the (thankfully) free-to-park on Sundays parking garage. So it took us a little longer to get where we were going, but we got there.

We settled down for lunch as the only people in the restaurant. Mind you, it was a breezy, beautiful Sunday -- temperatures were perfect, it was bright and sunny, and the city around us seemed to be alive with people jogging, walking their dogs, or taking their kids on walks in strollers. And yet, we were the only people in this restaurant?

Why did we need reservations, again?

The entire time we were there, it was like we had a private dining experience. Zero other customers came to eat in. One guy came to pick up a to-go order. That's it.

We had a giant meal, as we were planning -- Daisy got a "fried chicken" dinner complete with oyster mushroom "chicken," mashed potatoes, greens, and a biscuit -- and got a kale caesar salad on the side. I got their vegan seitan buffalo wings, and a burger they called the "buffalo blue burger," which came with fries on the side. To top it all off, we shared one of their milkshakes. Everything was vegan. I'd describe it all, but just look at the menu for yourselves, people:

Now, all of this being said, there's not much on that menu I wouldn't eat or wouldn't be interested in. I chose the burger over the reuben (and I love reubens, especially when they're done right) and the hot honey chicken sandwich, so this should tell you how excited I was for the burger.

However, neither of us were entirely fulfilled with this meal.

My burger was fantastic; it was, honestly, one of the best burgers I've ever had anywhere. But the fries were not french fries, they were "home fries" -- i.e. little potato cubes. They were fine, but if I want a burger and fries, I don't want fried potatoes with it, I want goddamn french fries. Modern Love, when they were around, had the best fries in town, hands down, fight me. These fries were not that.

My seitan wings were good, but they make them far smaller now than Modern Love ever did and I think that's to skimp on the product and jack up the price more. They used to be about 3x larger than they are now and you'd need a knife and fork to eat them -- they're now bite-sized and it's like ordering a little platter of vegan chicken nuggets.

Daisy was wholly underwhelmed with most of her meal. Her salad was fine but wasn't what was described on the menu, the "chicken" was fine but the greens were...strange, the biscuit was underwhelming, but the mashed potatoes were fire. I noticed for my own food that it wasn't exactly what was described on the menu either -- while my burger was great, it was not what was on the menu. There was no buffalo sauce or mayo on it -- there were the caramelized onions and a splat of something that tasted vaguely of blue cheese, but they also slapped four giant pickles on it (which aren't on the menu for the item) that I ended up giving to Daisy, and it had some sort of cheese on it, like a slice of vegan cheese that was fine.

Still, I mean, top tier burger and it was amazing, so I really can't complain that much...it's just not what was advertised.

Daisy's salad was the same way, it was more of a wedge salad in a bowl with a bunch of ingredients not listed on the menu.

This is why we were bittersweet on the entire experience -- like, the food was fine, and it was even quite good in several areas, but it was inconsistent and didn't match what was on the menu. I want these people to succeed because vegan fare like this needs to exist in Omaha, much as Modern Love served a great purpose and filled a food gap where it needed to -- but consistency is always key and their location, especially with the streetcar construction stuff, is doing them zero favors whatsoever.

The poor guy working there -- the only one who seemed to be in the restaurant at all (I'm sure there was a cook back there behind the scenes too) I gave a 30% tip to. He did a great job and it's clear that the restaurant is struggling. I'd give the burger an A+ but overall the restaurant experience here was a B-minus. We'll likely get food from them again, but it'll definitely be doordash'd or some other form of delivery. I'm guessing.

We left the restaurant and came home, as we'd had some fun plans for the rest of the day.

You see, for our anniversary weekends in the past, we've tended to be traditionalists. By that I mean that we've done similar things a lot because it's the time of the year to do them, or because we really like to do those things together. We've gone to the zoo a few times, we've gone to play games of some sort (mini golf or Dave & Buster's) a few times, and we've gone through the Ashland Safari a few times.

What is the Ashland Safari, you may be asking?

It is apparently the nation's number one safari park, in Ashland, Nebraska -- which is...eh, probably 40 minutes outside of Omaha? As the crow flies? Anyway, it's a drive-through safari, stretching through miles of hills and forest, wetlands and canopy, plains and savannah -- and if you had never been told about it, you would have zero idea whatsoever that it was out there. I've always said that it is wildly one of Nebraska's best kept secrets and driving through it, seeing the elk, bison, pelicans, deer, cranes and other water birds, etc -- is a wonderful experience.

It's a surreal, very one-with-nature experience, and Daisy and I have made the trip through the safari numerous times over the years -- always around this time of year. We plan to go back in the fall when the leaves are changing, because it will be beautiful to drive through the park with all of the colors in the trees.

If you're taking your time, it can take about two hours, maybe a little more, to go through the park drive. If you're moving normal speed, aren't stopping for photo opportunities or at the gift shop, visitor center, or any of the mid-park exhibits (like the pull-off area where you can stand at the opposite end of the bison field, or the dinosaur excavation exhibit, or the African Pygmy Goats petting zoo) you can get through the whole park in an hour or less. But, if you're ever in the area, I strongly urge you to find this place, pay the admission, and take your sweet time soaking it all in. I love nature, I love animals, and it's very clear that these animals are happy and thriving in very open and loving environments.

Also of note, if you click the link above, there is one part of the park we've never been through -- that's what they call "Wolf Canyon." We have never seen this Wolf Canyon, and I'm not sure it actually exists -- it's apparently part of a walking trail where there are wolves and bears. I have never seen the entrance to this walking trail, nor would I want to just jump out of the car and be like "hey wife, let's go hike where the wolves and bears are" because I'm not fucking stupid.

Anyway.

After we left the park, we stopped by Sonic to get limeades (a special treat for us) and then visited with the parents for a few hours, almost until dark, before both of us were ready to crash out. We came home, ate some more food -- I honestly can't remember what now, but I know I was ravenously hungry once we finally got home for the night -- and went to bed.

I slept off and on all night, despite my goals being to sleep for a short nap and then get back up to reset my sleep schedule. I then stayed awake for a few hours the next morning when Daisy arose to go to work, and then crashed out for the majority of the day so that I could resume my own working schedule for the rest of the week.

So that was, in longform story-telling time, our 12th anniversary weekend.

The story isn't finished yet, though.

Remember how I mentioned I got Daisy something small, yet very significant for an anniversary present?

Well.

On the night of February 14, 2013, in my little rented house in Newton, Kansas, I got down on one knee in the kitchen and asked Daisy to marry me. She said yes, and the rest is history.

But -- on the opposite side of the planet, at almost that exact same time, a giant meteor was hurtling down over Russia. The Chelyabinsk Meteor exploded as it traveled over the countryside, shattering windows with how loud the explosion was, and causing panic and injuries throughout the area. I always found it immensely fascinating that, at almost the exact time I was proposing to my now-wife, this meteor was screaming down towards our planet to explode and rain pieces all over that part of the world; it felt very cosmically intertwined with us, somehow.

I found a reputable collectors' site, and my anniversary present for Daisy -- for us as a whole, really -- is an actual certified piece of that meteor, about a centimeter in diameter and mounted in a display box. It's a piece of rock from outer space that fell as we committed ourselves to one another -- a shooting star brought down and captured in a box in our house forever.

Daisy thought it was very sweet and very romantic. I thought that as well, but I also think it is really fuckin' cool.

So, onward. Let's dive into June, and let's get this Canada thing underway.

The May of Discontent, Part II

2026-05-25T18:08:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, I posted -- and then quickly deleted -- a message about how I can no longer write, nor did I have the desire to do so anymore, and that I would figure out what I wanted to do with this site in the coming months.

May has been incredibly difficult for me. Getting off nicotine has been awful. It's not something I can accurately describe to anyone who has never had to do it. I don't even know how to describe it, actually. It feels as if you, as a sane human, are slipping into insanity in real time...and you can see it happening but you cannot stop it.

Over the course of the past several weeks I have felt like a spectator, a passenger in the car with myself as I'm going through life, and a horrified passenger and spectator at that. I have not been myself. I have not been a person I want to be, or a person that I like and identify with -- it's like looking into the mirror and seeing a twisted stranger or an evil twin staring back at you. I have not felt safe in my own mind and body, and at times I have absolutely, without a doubt felt that I have been a danger to myself and others.

And it's all because of a lack of nicotine.

Some of you will laugh at this, or make jokes that if that's all it took to push me over the edge, then I must've been closer than anyone realized, har har har, etc. And, maybe -- maybe -- there's a little truth in that. But, the much larger truth is that when you have had a substance in your bloodstream for over 25 years, you don't realize how much that substance takes over and what it regulates or otherwise controls.

Like it or not, nicotine regulated a lot of things in me. It gave me a creative drive, it sharpened my mind, and it was an appetite suppressant as the larger things -- but it also let me manage my stress and anger, it regulated my sleep and bowels, it changed my senses of taste and smell, and apparently -- among other little things -- kept my mouth bacteria under control.

I mentioned before that as soon as I quit vaping, my mouth broke out into blisters, sores, and swollen gums. This is apparently a side effect experienced by something like 30-40 percent of people who quit smoking or vaping, and I have never heard it mentioned or talked about before. Because nicotine is a natural disinfectant, your mouth biome goes nuts when it no longer has a constant flow of nicotine being inhaled through it, and it takes some time for your body to regulate it and get your mouth back to normal. Most people overcome this within a week or two at most, but for others it can take up to a month.

Guess who has been fighting it for nearly a month now? Me.

It has only been within the past several days where it seems -- seems -- like the mouth problems are finally starting to go away and heal. As recently as last weekend the mouth pain was so awful that it awakened me out of a dead sleep. Nothing really helps it -- brushing multiple times a day would make it feel a little better for a short time, and mouthwashes were absolutely brutal as they would amplify the pain tenfold. Daisy got a few different mouth sore soothing mouthwashes for me to try -- one of them had the consistency of NyQuil and did absolutely nothing, and the other had hydrogen peroxide in it and hurt so bad that I screamed and almost blacked out from the pain.

Yeah, I'm not kidding, the mouth stuff was awful.

I couldn't eat a lot of things -- anything that had sharp edges or would crunch felt like I was chewing razor blades. Because my tongue was covered in blisters and so irritated, my sense of taste almost completely disappeared. I would taste vague hints of whatever it was I was eating, but that's about it. Anything that was overly salty or acidic (except, interestingly enough, coffee) would bring a torturous pain that was unreal. This extended to the blandest of things at times too -- ketchup, for example, when I ate some on fries. The acid in the ketchup was brutal and I just couldn't do it. Anything vinegary, peppery, or spicy at all was a no-no too. Carbonated beverages would feel like they were attacking each and every blister personally.

What finally made it go away? Eh, I dunno. Time and Advil?

It's not all the way gone yet. My sense of taste is still very dulled and it feels like there is a film coating my mouth and teeth that just won't go away. But most of the pain is gone. Most of the sensitivity is gone.

What remains at this point, almost a month in?

My patience and reason are slowly returning. My kindness is slowly returning. My body is relearning how to regulate its own sleep. Muscle memory for vaping is starting to go away. My bowels are starting to completely re-regulate themselves.

My desire and ability to write are slowly returning. I told Daisy that if I lost that, I'd rather blow my brains out than continue to live without that drive.

My stamina for, well, life is slowly returning. My skin looks clearer. My breathing is clearer. Even my back spasms and pain have mostly gone away. I don't know how much of this can be attributed to a lack of nicotine, but, well, I'm not going to complain.

So, as I slowly crawl up out of this haze, I am able to poke up my head and look around at everything else going on without being blinded by a chemical dependency.

This coming weekend, Daisy and I will celebrate twelve years of marriage. I worked over the Memorial Day holiday in order to be able to take our anniversary off work in exchange. Daisy took the day off as well, and we are extending our weekend by an extra day. We have lunch reservations at a local vegan restaurant that will likely be outlandishly expensive, but eh, it's our anniversary.

On Thursday, we're ordering pizza from our favorite local place, and it is one of the very few times -- "rare and appropriate," so to speak -- that Daisy will get a full gluten crust, a full gluten anything, as she tends to avoid wheat when possible. However, it's our anniversary weekend, and I haven't vaped for a month, so...it's celebratory.

Last week, we went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu on its premiere-night-before-release showing of Thursday at 9:20pm. As you folks know, I do tend to book those premiere night tickets these days, primarily because there's almost nobody in the theater on those nights and because it lets us see the movie essentially before release. For some movies I really want to see them as soon as possible, and for others it's just a fun night out with the wife. Neither Daisy nor I work on Fridays, so a Thursday night date night is a little treat.

For those of you who expected a full-on, in-depth review of The Mandalorian and Grogu, you're going to have to go somewhere else for that. I thought the movie was fine -- it was fun, it was well-acted and the production value was great (read: it was pretty), but honestly it's skippable. It's a nice little bottle story that could've been the first 3-4 episodes of the next season of The Mandalorian on Disney+ and nobody would've batted an eye, and I think that is its main flaw -- if you're going to move this to the big screen, either do something mindblowing and universe-changing for the characters, or don't do it at all and just make it, again, the first 3-4 episodes of the next season of the show. Putting that into theaters seems a little...cash grabby. And this is Star Wars, owned by the Disney Corporation -- they have more money than God and no reason to be cash grabby about any of their properties.

Am I glad I booked the tickets and we got to see it in the theater? Sure. It was fun. Daisy enjoyed it, and she is not a Star Wars person. But it's not something we had to do that was a non-negotiable thing. I do like seeing Star Wars stuff on the big screen when I can, though.

Next week, we already have our premiere night tickets booked for Masters of the Universe, and I am appropriately excited for that. He-Man has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and the trailers I've seen make the movie look fun, which is something the franchise has needed for a long time.

In other news, I have now become allergic to...something.

Let me explain. About two weeks ago, when I was awake in the night playing games or writing here or who knows what, I ate something that gave me what seemed at the time to be a mild allergic reaction in my mouth -- my lips and cheek swelled up and my mouth became numb for a few hours before the feeling, eventually, subsided. With my mouth sores/pain still going strong at that time, I am not sure how bad it was because my mouth was already in pain and feeling raw and numb all the time anyhow.

Well.

A few nights ago I experienced the allergic reaction again, and it was stronger this time -- now that my mouth is healed up and like 95% normal, I could way more easily feel the swelling starting, the numbness and tingling forming, and this time...my throat began to close up.

Now, mind you, the one thing that I thought I had that was different than my normal foods was a new pack of sour blue raspberry Extra chewing gum...purchased, ironically, to give my mouth something to do because I'd quit vaping. I'd used it the night I'd had the mild reaction (and never thought anything of it at the time) and I'd had several more pieces of it the night that I had the strong reaction and my throat began to swell up, so -- this had to be the culprit, or so I thought.

That ruined our night, by the way -- we were supposed to have a quiet relaxing evening watching the new season of Married at First Sight on Netflix and eating dinner, leisurely, and my throat began closing up.

I will say that I have never had a food allergy before, to anything, to my knowledge. I have gone 43 years on this planet, closing in on 44, with relatively few allergies to anything. I have seasonal allergies to pollen, ragweed, etc -- and I have weather-related allergies to pressure changes and storm fronts and the like -- but never anything food-related. Randomly developing allergies to foods or flavorings or colorings, artificial colors/flavors or anything like that -- it has always been one of those back-burner paranoid fears. I've watched Daisy's mother randomly develop horrible allergies to foods she has eaten her entire life, just...out of the blue. Daisy's mother cannot have simple things like quinoa, bananas, walnuts or almonds, cinnamon, apples, and a long list of other things -- those allergies are all new, within the past several years. I have also watched nephews from both of Daisy's sisters have allergic reactions to foods so severe that they'd had to be rushed to the hospital or administered liquid Benadryl, epi-pens, or all of the above.

Good lord I do not want that at all.

So, there I sat on the couch, with Daisy getting more and more concerned with how the reaction was increasing (mind you, this was hours after I'd chewed this Extra gum). She kept asking me if I needed to go to the ER.

"No," I said. "I can breathe fine--" I took deep breaths in and out to prove it to her. "It's my swallow hole that's closing up, not the breathing hole."

"It's the same throat," she said.

"Yes, but it is two different tubes," I said.

Which is true. It wasn't my trachea that was closing up, it was my esophagus -- it was very difficult to swallow.

I took two Benadryl -- which, because of paranoia, we always have in the house -- and within a half hour I felt the reaction stopping and I was beginning to get drowsy. I told Daisy that I needed to go upstairs and crash, because the Benadryl was not giving me a choice in the matter. I apologized for ruining our evening.

I immediately threw the two unopened packs of gum I had left directly into the trash. Not risking that again.

I went upstairs and sat at my computer for a bit, catching up on Youtube, to give the Benadryl some time and to confirm that it wasn't just stopping the allergic reaction, but was actively reversing it -- fighting the sleep that it was trying to pull me into the entire time. When, after about an hour, I was actively feeling the reaction subside, I logged off my machine and settled into my chair -- fully clothed, sweaty, but near unconscious already, and passed out.

Daisy told me that she came in about an hour later to check on me to make sure I wasn't dead, and I told her I was fine and to go away, because I was sleeping. I do not remember this.

I next awoke approximately four hours later, at which juncture I desperately needed to pee, but my allergic reaction was completely gone as if it had never happened. I used the bathroom and checked my messages to find a message from Mama asking if I was okay -- to which I replied I was -- and then I passed back out.

I awoke another hour or so later with horrible diarrhea (because, of course I did) and texted Daisy from the bathroom that my stomach was going nuts and I just needed to rest, so please let me do so -- and if she heard me struggling in the bathroom to try to ignore me. She was still downstairs and was talking on the phone, at length, to one of our mutual friends who is currently going through a messy divorce and needed some moral support.

When I finally awoke, it was almost dawn. I had slept for what my Fitbit had declared was almost nine hours, had gotten up to use the bathroom twice, and had a very deep, sweaty sleep in my chair while I dream-battled Benadryl demons (figuratively; I just remember having some really bizarre dreams). But the reaction was over, and as a side effect I'd gotten some great sleep because of it.

Well, for the moment.

Later that morning, as we were getting up and starting our day, I had some chips to put something on my stomach. They were the Walmart-brand, Great Value cheddar-and-sour-cream ripple chips -- chips that I have eaten, no joke, probably 500 times from Walmart over the course of the past 30 years or so. I had four bags of them in the house and they tend to be a go-to for me for cheap chips when I do a grocery order.

Immediately after eating, eh, maybe 1/3 of a bag of the chips -- mostly finishing the crumbs at the bottom of the bag that I'd been eating, in my office, off and on for a week -- my mouth began to go numb, lips and cheeks began to swell, and my throat started to close.

My first thought was what the fuck, I'm allergic to the chips too? and then I realized that the days I'd eaten the chips up to that point -- including the fact that I'd eaten a bunch of them the day before -- had coincided with the days I'd had reactions. However, I'd eaten some of the chips in the middle of the night too, between reaction one and reaction two, and had not experienced any side effects.

This reaction wasn't as bad as the one the night before, but it did seem to come on far faster. I immediately took a single Benadryl and it made the reaction subside quickly, but I was now left with a dilemma. Was it actually the chips? Was it actually the gum? I don't know. I didn't have anything out of the ordinary otherwise, and it seems strange to get a spontaneous allergic reaction to something in the potato chips that I've legit been eating on a fairly decent regular basis for the past 30ish years.

The other factor is another gum, interestingly enough -- Big Red. I got a case of Big Red when I stopped vaping, because I like Big Red (it's about the only cinnamon-related thing I can stand). I chewed Big Red on all of the occasions I also had the allergic reactions -- however, I've also chewed half the case of it before those reactions with no effect whatsoever, so....who knows.

I still have an open pack of Big Red in front of me and I am not going to risk chewing any more of it until I don't have to be on the clock for work anymore for the week and don't have anything else to do for the day, because I need a controlled environment. I still have the Big Red and I still have two unopened bags of the chips -- we're gonna find out for damn sure which one is the culprit.

So...yeah. Onward into the rest of summer, I suppose.

The May of Discontent

2026-05-10T17:31:00.001-05:00

So, here we are. May.

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote here, so I should probably update everyone on what's going on in our lives. I should start with the good things, I suppose:

1. The AC is working great when we've needed to use it, the cats are all in good health, and all of our bills are paid for the time being.

2. We have, thus far, avoided severe weather this year. That's not to say it won't happen later in the season, but avoiding it this far along into the season is great and legit what I'd like every midwestern spring to be like.

3. Mama's dental surgery in Denver went fine and she is now back home in Omaha.

4. Plans for the trip to Canada next month are progressing, and we're now able to start plotting who will be around and who won't be around during the days we're there.

5. Both of us have re-dyed our hair, as planned, in advance of the trip. Daisy has gone neon green and I have gone black-purple. Part of doing it this far in advance is so that it stops bleeding out by the time we're there.

6. Hank turned three years old:

But there are some really frustrating things going on as well, of course. Because of course there are.

I am now eight days nicotine-free. My last nicotine vape burned out and gave up the ghost last Saturday night, and I've been on my own since then. No nicotine gum, no nicotine mints, no nicotine anything -- I am fully nicotine free for the first time in twenty-five years. I have a lot of regular chewing gum to support me (though it makes my jaw ache, badly) and I've been trying to stay as hydrated as possible to wash any and all nicotine remnants out of me.

I feel fine, mentally and psychologically. I will tell you that it was way, way harder to stop smoking cigarettes, and when I did that I had the help of vapes. I will also say that yes, I have been far more irritable and my anger will go from 0-100 super fast, and I no longer have any patience whatsoever for stupidity or waiting on any people or situations.

No, because I know you're going to ask -- I do not have actual nicotine cravings. This surprises me on many, many levels because I have had that substance continuously in my blood for the past twenty-five years, and to suddenly be without it should be sending my blood, and my brain, into absolute shock. It's not. In fact, I feel really...normal. Like, I feel a bit more unhinged (like I mentioned above) but I am not feeling any mental or psychological symptoms of a chemical dependency withdrawal.

However...

In case you were not aware, there are some major physical changes you'll quickly notice when you just up and quit nicotine after two and a half decades of daily use. And I didn't know any of these were coming, at least not offhand.

For one, my stomach has become a bottomless pit, for the most part. This is not stifled by the Mounjaro nor is it stifled by staying very, fully hydrated every day. Nicotine is a well-known appetite suppressant. It's part of why I've been able to keep weight off as I've lost it over the years -- the transition from tobacco to vape likely helped me lose the close-to-eighty pounds I lost a few years back and definitely stopped it from coming back. For two, because my stomach has become a bottomless pit, I've gained like eight pounds since I've been off nicotine. I'm the only person I know who has actually gained weight on Mounjaro rather than lost it.

I have developed sores and blisters throughout my entire mouth, and my whole mouth feels...well, infected and raw. I initially thought I was having a cold sore flare up and began pounding the L-Lysine pills to get it to stop, but that's not it. Did you know what smoking/vaping nicotine, the nicotine constantly in your mouth acts as a strong antibacterial agent? Well, it does. Did you know that when you stop smoking/vaping nicotine, that antibacterial agent is no longer there and the bacteria in the mouth are like muahahahah, after twenty-five years we're FREEEEEEE and basically flare up and cause multiple infections in your mouth?

Yeah. Not kidding, that happens. I didn't know it was a thing until my mouth started hurting and blisters formed on my tongue, my lips and gums got swollen, etc. My lymph nodes on my neck are so swollen up that they feel like they could burst at any given time. Daisy did some research and apparently this is very normal and it is not a new infection, just a surge in what's already there until the body can re-regulate itself naturally -- this takes about a week or two. A week or two. Of agony every time I try to eat something that isn't bland.

I don't know how I can describe the pain and discomfort of my mouth to you, so I'll attempt to give you an example. This is Mother's Day weekend, and as part of Daisy's gift to Mama, she wanted to make a big dinner of falafel salad, tortilla chips, and hummus for all of us. She made her own lemon-based salad dressing and made her famous homemade garlic hummus, with lots of lemon and olive oil in it. It was wonderful and extremely delicious...and the acidity of all of it put my mouth into screaming pain because of the sores and blisters. I couldn't even finish my meal because each bite was agony.

So...yeah.

To combat this, I have been using mouthwash (to kill the germs, essentially) like, four or five times a day. It helps, and my mouth is slowly starting to heal, but holy hell I never knew about any of these side effects before.

And, of course, not to be outdone, one of the other side effects of quitting nicotine is...diarrhea.

I really wish I were making this up, but I'm not. I'm doing better now, a week later, but for the first several days of giving it up, I had nothing but diarrhea. Like, a lot of it, 5-10x per day, no matter what I ate or didn't eat -- and no matter whether I took probiotics to help regulate things or not. It also did not matter whether I took the anti-diarrheal, "stop pooping pills" or not -- no real change. I am thankful to say that this side effect has subsided and my bowels have returned to normal at this juncture, but those first few days were very rough.

Finally, my sleep has been an absolute wreck. I sometimes can fall asleep and sleep for multiple hours, or there are times where I'll be exhausted and will only sleep an hour or two. Or I alternate between being fully alert and awake to needing to crash and my body not taking no for an answer within a five minute period, going to power-nap for 20-25 minutes, and then being good for several more hours before the process repeats. When I get off work in the morning, I'm either asleep by 7:20 or so, or I'm awake until like 9 or 10, there's no gray area. It also usually does not help that Gary, my beloved youngest son, takes great delight in coming to bed around noon or 1 every day to knead on me and chew on my fingers or toes to make sure I'm awake for the day.

Yeah, that's the one.

Every day it's all a little bit better, though. I find it weird that I have all of the other physical symptoms, but when it comes to actual psychological symptoms I have basically none. Daisy would disagree with that -- she'd say I was far more combative, rude, and overall angry, but...honestly this is the wild west for me, I am not sure that's just not who I am as a person and have always have been, and the nicotine was just a mask or veil over that -- an insulator, a buffer. I don't know this because, again, there's not been a time where there wasn't nicotine in my system for more than 24 hours or so for twenty-five years.

So, there's all of that I've been personally dealing with. I don't like it. I don't like any of it. But it's slowly going away and getting better by the day. I guess. I couldn't really tell you for sure, honestly.

Canada Prep 2026, Part II: The Summer of Evolution

2026-04-30T08:32:00.000-05:00

So we're in the last week of April now, having thankfully dodged a number of severe weather threats and most other crises, and it's time to get back to the grind and to continue plotting the next big event on the horizon, which remains...the Canada trip.

It's hard to believe that two months from now, we will have gone to Canada and will have already returned home, but it's true, and it's coming up faster than we think. There are a lot of items on my to-do list that still need to be accomplished, and a lot happening in the time between now and when we leave that is unrelated and/or otherwise completely separate from the trip itself, yet still needs to be done before we leave.

I mentioned here that the Great Closet Purge of 2026™ is done, at least on my part. I now have an astounding amount of closet space compared to before, and my final three bags of donations are set to be dropped off at Goodwill this coming weekend. All in all, I cleared out roughly half, maybe a little more, of my entire wardrobe. If I hadn't worn it in years, it was donated. If I would never wear it or wear it again, it was donated. If it didn't bring me joy at the same levels as my favorite clothing, it was donated. I am evolving as a human when it comes to possessions -- if I don't need it and it's simply something I've acquired over the years, it gets sold or donated. I don't have time or space for all of the stuff I've gathered over the years, and it all must go. Tough choices were made. Things I loved but couldn't see a use for were gotten rid of. Things I may want or need in the future, I gave a long hard look to, and decided if I ever have a use for a particular item again, I'd just buy new.

I cannot tell you how many pairs of winter gloves I came across in my purge, or how many Covid-era hand-sewn or otherwise purchased cloth face masks I found. These were all laundered and set aside in storage. I can't tell you how many pairs of socks I've acquired over the past several years, only that about once or twice a year I will purchase a new pack of socks and rarely clear out the old ones. Well, now all the old ones are cleared out.

I cannot tell you how many pairs of flip-flops and sandals I donated or outright tossed, as I get probably ten or so new pairs a year to help cycle out the old ones that wear out. Some of the newer ones I end up wearing once, hating, and then donating. This probably sounds wasteful to you, but I'm sure the people who shop at thrift stores will appreciate some new sandals. I have no need to buy any new flip-flops or sandals for years as of right now -- I still have some that are barely used and a few other pairs still in their packaging, pairs that I know I love since I have the same ones in other colors.

That being said, I'm always on the lookout for new, good sandals.

As for actual shoes, I mentioned before that I'd found a lot of old pairs of shoes that I'd either never worn or had worn once or twice and never again. Those all got donated -- even my black combat boots. I haven't worn those boots in at least five years, probably longer. They're a pain in the ass to get on and off and if I need new boots I'll be looking for a more comfortable, practical pair. I made sure to keep a few pairs of actual shoes that I really love wearing, and the rest were donated.

That being said, I'm always on the lookout for new, comfortable and breathable daily shoes, too. I've got a few pairs, but my Hey Dudes are my go-to pair these days if I need to wear shoes somewhere.

I'm down to my last three vapes. I told Daisy over the weekend that by the end of the week, I will be off nicotine completely, for better or worse. I'd like to try just going without, cold turkey style, if possible, to see how I feel, before I go on the Chantix. If I don't need the Chantix, I don't need it -- if it becomes very apparent that I do need it, I have it at the ready, of course.

Any nicotine mints and gum I had in the house has already been thrown out so that I am not tempted, along with any and all of my other vape-related things -- at great cost to myself -- so that I can commit to this. I am a bit nervous and apprehensive, but I want to be done with it. I want to know what living without a chemical addiction is really like. I want my brain and body to normalize, completely without nicotine, for the first time since I was in college. Since I was a teenager.

Truth be told, since the pandemic or so it has been a nightmare to be a vaper. Ten years ago it was a vaper's paradise, where you could go anywhere on any website and get anything you wanted, juice in any flavor, any tank or device you thought would work best for you, and you could go to one of many shops in pretty much any city or place you lived in and get supplies. Companies were hosting "cloud competitions," where you won prizes for blowing the biggest clouds of vape. It was a wild time.

However, all sorts of regulations kicked in, most shops began closing their doors, flavors were discontinued, and almost every single website I ever got anything from shut down, most of them very quickly and unceremoniously. The ones who didn't close up shop moved heavily to disposable devices that fell into regulation loopholes, and because of that they could jack prices through the roof as they were now the devices of favor. My own local store struggled heavily and probably still does, though I have not been in there for probably two years or more now. I found one site, one site, where I could get a lot of what I wanted or needed, and used that store a lot all the way through, oh, probably Christmas or so, before I realized that I was spending so much money on this shit for very little return and I just wanted to be done.

So, I'm down to my last three disposable vapes. It is what it is. Once I'm done, I'm done. I don't want to look back, I don't want to crave nicotine anymore, I just want it all washed out of my system and to be done. And yes, it's likely going to be hard for those first few days or weeks. Daisy is aware of this and asked me to give her warning, asked me to let her know when I was totally done so that she could steel herself against the attitude shift I will almost certainly have, but that's it. And I may or may not use the Chantix. I have a wait and see approach to it and I'd like to do a little research on it before I stick it in my body and hope for the best.

Anyway.

I mowed the front and back yards on Saturday for the first time this year. They still look awful, but they look considerably less awful than before, as they were basically a jungle before I mowed. There are a ton of tall dandelions that are still sticking up that the mower didn't get, but I can go back over everything again this weekend and make things look good, and likely do the string trimming too. I did a little of that on Saturday as well.

Mama is in Denver right now; she has gone out there for a surgery on her tooth by a dentist Daisy's sister is friends with, as he was able to get her in without waiting another month. She flew out there on Friday and will be back home sometime this next week, likely. The procedure was successful and she's recovering in the home of Daisy's sister at this time, and getting some family visit time in before she comes back.

Work has been...trying. I've mentioned before that we're constantly understaffed and every night is a struggle -- well, that's always been the case to one degree or another. However, over the past few weeks, we've had some leadership out on vacation or otherwise out of the office for a few days' worth of time, and that tends to throw everything into disarray. It means I tend to do double or triple the normal amount of work on any given night and I am...fairly bitter about that. Part of the reason I stay at my job is that it pays me well for what I do and generally as long as I perform the basics of my job's functions, I'm mostly left alone. All this extra accountability and responsibility when other leadership is out of the office is honestly for the birds, man. A decade ago, I jumped at any possible opportunity to prove myself -- now, older and wiser, I'm tired and am very much like "let the kids do that shit, I'm done going above and beyond, just give me my fucking paycheck and leave me alone." I think they refer to this sort of behavior as "quiet quitting" -- doing the job just well enough to not get fired. I'm not quite all the way there yet, but I feel myself getting to that point, slowly, I'm already at the point where my answer to the question "why was this missed" or "why did this not get done" is "because I'm one person doing three jobs, and I have three people under me on overnights now when I used to have eight." I'm no longer sugarcoating things to our higher leadership with my responses when our current situation remains untenable.

It also just comes down to, as I've mentioned here many times before, being done wanting to work at all anymore. I've been working pretty nonstop for the past 25 years in one form or another, and I'd really like to be done now. It's no longer fun, it's no longer fulfilling, and I've given up every dream I've had in order to just be able to pay bills. It's a pretty miserable existence.

April Showers, Part VII: Air'd Out

2026-04-27T16:47:00.002-05:00

Well, hello.

The new AC unit is installed, and the storms mostly missed us.

So, let's get into the story.

On Thursday morning, I had just gotten off work and had gone to sleep for a couple of hours before the guys arrived. Daisy was able to get up and take care of them, letting them in and letting them begin their work. I attempted to go back to sleep for a few more hours, but that was not, apparently, in the cards as Dolly and Gary were both wildly curious about the HVAC guys, and Daisy had to close them up in the bedroom with me.

Do you know what that means? It means that as soon as they were locked in the bedroom with me -- mind you, I'm in bed, still in my underwear, still mostly asleep -- they were on me, crying, like "Dad! DAD! There are men in the house!" Etc.

Well, there was no sleeping through that.

There was no way I was going back to sleep. And I'd slept a little less than three hours or so, give or take, before they'd arrived -- so I was mostly okay. Tired, yes. But, mostly okay. So, at 10am, after working until 6am, taking a shower, and going to bed...I was up and mobile for the day.

Within twenty minutes of me being up and out of bed, I looked out of my office window to find the old unit already in the yard and disassembled and the new unit on the slab being installed. They were moving fast. Apparently, according to Daisy, one guy was outside and the other was on the inside in our utility closet, feeding wiring through the wall conduit and setting up the new inside-the-house coil, working in tandem. They had to build an entirely new metal housing inside the closet above the new furnace and install some sort of control mechanism that they called a "dragonfly" on the wall of the new part of the system inside the house. It was, apparently, a lot more complicated than "unplug old unit, remove old unit, place new unit, plug in new unit" because it's not the 1970s anymore and these new systems are way more high-tech than the 50-year-old shitbox we had attached to our house previously.

So, at this juncture, what was I to do? Daisy was downstairs keeping tabs on the cats and essentially supervising the workers (she would tell them "I'm not hovering, please don't think that, I'm just trying to keep the cats away from the doors and the closet and make sure they don't bother you or get into your stuff") and I was awake when I didn't want to be.

So, I caught up on some of my Youtube channels and kept a close eye on the storms that were rolling in. I didn't have much of a choice. It was gearing up to be, as mentioned, the "nightmare scenario" of these techs racing the clock, trying to get this done so they could go home for the day and take shelter. Mind you, Daisy takes this stuff in stride, with a very "whatever will be, will be" mentality -- she's downstairs on her phone on the couch, browsing through vegan recipes and I'm the one who's up here plotting out the possible paths of storms based on the radar, and trying to calculate timing.

What started out as a beautiful morning gradually got darker and darker. This did not seem to faze these HVAC guys, who as far as I saw did not even take a break while they worked.

Daisy texted me from the downstairs around noon, telling me that she wanted me down there by 1 or so, as she would be starting her work for the day at 1:30 and wanted a little decompression time. So, shortly before 1, I went downstairs to observe and report. She hung around for a bit and then went back upstairs to do her work for the day.

I should mention that all this time, the cats were terrified. The work had been done outside for the most part, and they were now focusing on working in the utility closet to finish up the wiring and connections. They also had to build a new aluminum housing for, I guess, some of the new components that were installed in a sort of stacked configuration above and on top of the furnace, and that involved a lot of banging and drilling and impact-wrenching. I don't think I have ever seen Hank so scared in his life. Emmy decided to just hide in their play tunnel and ignore the world. The others would venture out every once in a while when the noises stopped out of sheer curiosity, but any sudden movements or loud noises would send them flying back out of the room and upstairs.

I had brought down my tablet, my phone, and my vape to sit on the couch for observation. I thought it would be rude were I to put on Netflix or something, but if I was bored I could at least play some games on my phone or read a book on Kindle. Throughout the next hour or so, the sky got darker and darker, to the point where it began to look like nightfall was coming outside. Eventually I relented and turned on the local weather on the TV, and kept the volume as low as possible (at like, 1 or 2), so we could have some warning if the storms were moving in. The storms at that time were all around us, but weren't close enough to hit us. Numerous severe thunderstorm watches, warnings, and tornado watches and warnings were popping up all over the area, but none of them within 30-40 miles of us -- so it was a morbid curiosity at best.

By around 2:30 or so, they were mostly finished, and started gathering their tools. They turned the system on and immediately the house began cooling down -- by a lot. The new AC was far quieter than the old one and it seemed to work wildly well. They wrapped everything up, took their stuff out the back door, and I was expecting them to come back in to have me sign paperwork or something like that -- but I looked out the window about five minutes later and they were gone -- they had vanished. So, uh, I guess we were done? I thought I'd have to sign off on something like I did with the furnace, but apparently not, and I was left downstairs with the cats and a rapidly-cooling house.

I let Daisy know they were done, the system was running and working, and then unhooked the portable AC unit upstairs in the bedroom we'd been using to stay cool at night so that I could go back downstairs and focus on the incoming weather.

By around 3 or so we had our first thunder and rain -- hard rain, with a little hail. Not bad hail, just barely pea-sized. Some of the thunder was loud enough to rattle the windows and doors, but I wouldn't call it severe by any stretch of the imagination, just a normal spring thunderstorm. It was short-lived and moved off quickly.

When you live in the midwest in the spring, local weather coverage for severe events pre-empting normal programming on network TV for a few hours at a time, commercial-free, is not anything new. To an extent, it's kind of exciting, especially when they have live cameras stationed around the city and reporters driving around through it giving real-time live-feed coverage of certain parts of the area. When I lived in the Kansas City area many years ago, I wasn't anywhere near as anxious or as focused on the weather as I am now; it didn't concern me because while I'd been through some nasty storms at that point (including storms while I lived there), none of them had caused damage to anything I'd been around or inside of. Of course, at that time, I also didn't have any property to damage -- I didn't own a vehicle, I didn't own a home, I was just there. So yes, bad storms -- pretty godawful ones at times -- would roll through, and I didn't really pay them much mind.

When I moved to Kansas and lived there, I began to pay a little closer attention -- I was in my own rented house at that point and I did own a car, and Kansas should be called "the tornado state" given its association with how many roll through there every year. That is when I started paying closer attention to tornado forecasts and potential outbreaks, as well as other severe hazards. Yet, the entire time I lived in Kansas -- five years, from 2009 to 2014 -- I think the closest any tornado got to me was maybe 15-20 miles away? Something like that. I used to say 30 miles away but as I've gotten older I realize how close some of those little towns that got hit were to where I lived at the time. Newton would get torn up here and there while I lived there with severe thunderstorms and softball-sized hail -- still the largest hail I've ever seen in person -- but no actual tornadoes struck that little flat town in the time I lived there, and I can only remember the tornado siren going off a handful of times during my tenure there.

Even when I moved to Omaha in 2014 -- during one of the more active stretches of severe weather I've seen, from 2014 to about 2017 or so -- I wasn't incredibly concerned with the weather and both of us lived in an apartment complex and parked outside with no cover during those years. I was in an apartment, my car (and later, the truck) was beat to shit and 20 years old even then, and I remained mostly unbothered. I remember the few days after our wedding, I was sitting on the parents' back porch smoking and watching the storms roll in, and went inside and asked "it's probably a bad thing when the storm clouds right above us start rotating pretty strongly, isn't it?"

No, what really ramped up my storm anxiety was when we lost the retaining wall in 2019, and then in 2021 lost both of our giant silver maple trees in the front yard in separate storms, then in 2024 when 80mph winds ripped part of the cowling off our garage and took out power for multiple days. Now I am terrified of severe weather, because apparently we're just one bad storm away from needing to spend thousands of dollars we don't have on repairs and cleanup. It's no longer a novelty for me; I've paid far too much money I couldn't afford to spend on bullshit storm damage just because Nebraska weather wants to be an asshole sometimes.

So, I sat there in our freshly-air-conditioned living room and watched the storm coverage with a morbid curiosity. Even by the time the HVAC guys left, I knew it wasn't going to be a major event for us, just by the way the storms were tracking even then, but I do have a scientific fascination with weather and the forecasting of weather, so I languidly watched the reporting as different storms rolled over different parts of the area. The first round had rolled through shortly after 3, and the second rolled through around 3:45 with a bit more heavy rain and thunder, and then...it was gone. The local weather said as of 4:10 the severe weather had finished for us and they were resuming normal programming, and as soon as they said that I gathered my stuff, turned off the TV, and went back upstairs.

So the vast majority of the severe weather missed us yet again. Yes, there were a few minor tornadoes around the area, 50 miles away or more, but nothing close to us and I don't think anything above a EF-2. I could be wrong there though as I didn't pay much attention to it after the fact. I was just glad that my stressors for the day had ceased, I had air conditioning again, and I still had two more days of my "weekend" with which I could decompress.

In the evening, after Daisy got off work and we had dinner, it had finally cooled down enough to where we could ease off the AC and turn it "up" so it wouldn't run constantly. I did so, and the system wound down and shut down as per it was supposed to...and the furnace fan kept running.

Hm. That's interesting.

I waited twenty minutes, the fan kept running. I turned off the system completely. The fan kept running.

Hm. That's not good, that's not right.

Now, we had this happen a while back a couple of times, with the old furnace and the old air conditioner. Those times, a relay had blown or the system had needed a hard reset. So, I performed the hard reset on the new system -- that means turning off the breaker, waiting a bit, and then turning it back on. I did that, and...in five seconds, the fan kicked back on and was blowing again. Sigh.

I tested it once more, using the actual AC. The AC would kick on, run its cycle until the house was cool enough, and then the thermostat would turn it off and the fan....kept going. Again. We didn't need the AC that night -- it was getting down into the 40s after the storms and the cold front blew through -- so I just left it off at the breaker and left the system off. I told Daisy she would need to call again in the morning to have the guys come back out and fix whatever was wrong with it.

Friday morning rolled around, Daisy called, and the original tech who came to examine our system came back out to the house. He messed around with it a bit, did some troubleshooting, and found that upon installation, the dip switches (whatever those are) weren't set correctly. He set those, tested a few more things, and essentially performed a hard reboot of the system, and the problem was fixed. Our AC has worked normally since, and has kicked on and off normally when we need it to run. He did, however, tell me two things I didn't know:

1. Whether it's on heat or cool, depending on the season, always leave the system on. As in, with these new systems, they don't need to be turned off unless absolutely necessary. Leaving them on reduces wear on the components, etc. If they don't need to run all the time, set them to temperatures where they won't need to and adjust as necessary.

2. Some people hate it and don't want to do it, but it's recommended (by whom, I don't know) that the house fan on the furnace is just left on at all times. That more evenly circulates the air in the house and keeps the components of the HVAC system from being overworked.

...I don't think that last one is accurate. Seems to me that if the fan were running constantly, it would wear out and blow out the fan motor much more quickly than normal use. Add to that we'd likely need to change the very expensive (like, $40 each) filters every month or so instead of once every eight or nine months because they'd be constantly pulling in dust, dander from the cats, and dirt from the air. So, no, we're not doing that. I also don't want a part of my house to be constantly on, nor do I want constant airflow from the vents at all times.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is a new thing that's really true and really recommended, but I somehow doubt that.

So, anyway, it's all done. Life has returned to normal within our household, even if it feels like "normal" equates to "waiting for the next big appliance to decide it no longer wants to work."

April Showers, Part VI: The Nightmare Scenario

2026-04-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

The new AC unit was $5500. It was paid for via credit card and we are now that much more into debt.

It could not be avoided. It's stupid to sink almost $3k into repairs of a 50-year-old unit that may die a week later, or may live another year or two before the next major repair or replacement is needed, so we opted for the replacement and for an upgraded two-phase unit for the house that will run normally during somewhat milder temperatures and will kick into mega cold when it's like 90-100 outside.

It has not yet been installed. It was paid for last night and the parts were ordered. Our HVAC guys said it could be put in rather quickly -- as in, it could be installed this week, likely.

"That's going to be interesting," I told Daisy. "It's Tuesday night, we're expecting near-certain severe weather on Thursday, and I'm sure there's more than a 24 hour turnaround for this stuff. So that leaves...Friday? I guess if they're doing it this week that would be the best day anyhow since we're both off and I don't have to be asleep all day."

If it's not done by Friday, it would be until at least Monday. These guys don't work weekends. Seems to me that they're missing out on an extra two days of revenue stream there, but whatever, I don't make their rules.

I texted Daisy this morning before I went to sleep that with the terrible weather possible tomorrow, if they called to set up the appointment, set it for Friday and not tomorrow -- I have to sleep at some point and she shouldn't have to take off any more work than necessary, and the last thing I want to do is for the technicians to race the clock on this:

So of course they call, say "tomorrow," and Daisy says "yes."

I am so incredibly mad and frustrated.

"Call back and tell them Friday," I said. "Full stop. I can't go 27 hours without sleep again like I did for the furnace installation -- I just can't. I also can't do that only to crash out just as the worst weather of the season and possible tornadoes are getting ready to hit us."

She called back. Friday appointments are full. It's either tomorrow morning or some nebulous timeframe of "next week" that we wouldn't have a date for or any real control of at the moment.

It is somewhere around this point where I began to break and lose my mind a little.

Look, the past few weeks have not been great. Work has been fucking awful, I can rarely now get more than 4 hours of sleep at any given time (it used to be six, and boy do I wish I could still sleep six hours straight without interruption; that sounds like a dream) and both of us have been constantly running. The AC blowing out and putting us further in the hole financially and the debacle with Daisy's windshield isn't helping matters much, nor is the cost of gas, groceries, vet appointments, and everything else skyrocketing over the course of the past month. Add Daisy's almost two-week sickness that started in NC to that, and basically, everything's been pretty shitty ever since we returned from my parents and has steadily gotten worse day by day. I am hot and sweaty as well as really sleep-deprived and angry at the world, and I've just been told that everything I did not want to happen tomorrow is, in fact, happening tomorrow whether I want it to or not.

The technicians are supposed to be here tomorrow between 8am and 10am.

"They said the guy has one appointment before us," Daisy said.

"...so that means they'll be here at 10am or after," I said, sighing and rubbing my temples.

The removal of the old AC unit and installation of the new one will take, approximately, 5-6 hours. If they get here at 10, that would mean they'd be here until around 4. If they get here at 8 on the dot -- which will not happen -- they'd be done by 1 or 2.

Storm chances increase the further into the afternoon hours we go. It's possible that they could start firing up before 3pm or it's possible they could wait until 5-6. The main threat window is apparently 4pm to 10pm "with all hazards possible" before the storms quickly exit the area. Tomorrow is the highest threat of tornadoes, wind damage and large hail that we've had predicted for the better part of a year, localized to our area more specifically than some of the surrounding areas. The local weather folks I follow think it's going to happen sooner rather than later, and have all threats move outside of the area and be done by 8pm.

None of this fills me with any sort of hope. This makes the entire day tomorrow essentially be a game of "race the clock" for these guys, which is exactly what I did not want. Weather aside, when I pay $5500 for an appliance, I want it installed carefully and with precision, with every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed. I don't want HVAC guys scrambling to do it before tornadoes strike because they don't want to postpone it or get caught in awful weather while trying to finish and have to stop halfway through.

I also don't want them to get it done, thank them, have them leave and for it to run for an hour or two of sweet new AC bliss only to have the power get taken out by the storms, or for violent storms to roll through and damage the house or the new, freshly-installed AC unit. I have less control over that, of course.

I know a lot of this is anxiety talking, too. I know how I get when I'm stressed and sleep deprived and awful weather is predicted. I also know that I can't control it and can't change it, so it's a big shit sandwich I have to take multiple bites of. I can already see anxiety robbing me of a third of my weekend, robbing me of sleep and relaxation time and downtime, and it really can't be avoided.

People without anxiety do not understand the concept of it; it's like it's a foreign entity to them. Their knee-jerk response is along the lines of "why stress about something you can't change or control?"

They don't realize the other side of that coin is "oh, so only be stressed about things I can change or control? If I can change or control it, why would I be stressed about it?" If you can fix a problem, it's not a problem. If you can fix a problem and choose not to because you'd rather suffer and be anxious, that is stupid, and that's on you.

I've talked about this here before.

The second knee-jerk reaction is "if you can't change your situation, change your perspective," which generally makes me want to punch the person who says it before the sentence is out of their mouth. But, for the sake of argument, let's follow this logic for a moment and do a "perspective change."

Okay, perspective changed. Nothing else has changed but inside your mind. Changing your perspective does not stop the storms and possible tornadoes. It does not stop the sleep loss and necessary time spent to take care of the AC; both of those things will have physical effects and take a physical toll both internally and externally no matter my perspective on it or how I personally feel about it.

So what does any of that help, exactly? "Change your perspective" is disrespectful to the person suffering from anxiety about anything; it's essentially saying "suck it up and get over it" because it does nothing to solve the problem. Therapy and medications wouldn't remove the tornadoes or change time frames or the like either, so get outta my face with that horseshit too.

Anyway, I'm getting off track.

Daisy is taking the morning off tomorrow so that I can get some sleep; she will make up the time on Friday morning (when she would normally not be working). The working plan is that she'll handle the guys when they get here and make sure the cats are secure and not in the way, and when I wake up it'll be like "halftime, switch sides" and I'll monitor the rest of the work through completion. This also means I'll be at least somewhat rested to handle whatever's necessary as well as be alert to monitor whatever storms are coming in, as Daisy still works until 5:30 -- well into the window of when these storms should be hitting, if they actually come for us.

Again, we've had some forecasts for nasty weather multiple times over March and April already, and we got nothing or next to nothing as the storms formed up either south of us or east of us. I really hope that will be the case tomorrow as well, but in the back of my mind I'm also like well, we're due now, since we haven't gotten anything yet this year.

Yes, I understand that's like standing in front of a slot machine at a casino and being like "well, I'm due now because I haven't hit the jackpot in 5000 spins, so this machine has to be ready to pay out to me" and yeah, that's not how chance works, it's random and fickle and why gamblers usually lose all their money and end up betting their homes and cars and losing them too.

More than anything, I'm just tired. I just want to wave my hand like it's a magic wand and have all this shit be done so I no longer have to stress about it.

I keep telling myself that a 2 is essentially "meh" on the scale here, and there have been times where we've been a 3 or 4 and we haven't gotten more than a normal, quiet thunderstorm and some rain, if that -- but there are also times we've been under a 1 or 2 and all hell has been unleashed. So, it is what it is.

In my head I'm also like look, if the storms are gonna hit and do their worst, just end me or do nothing -- either kill me so I don't have to worry about it or completely bypass us and do nothing, but don't just damage the house or the roof or other parts of our property to where it's something that will stress us out more and cost us more money to fix, because I will wish at that point that I had been killed rather than have to deal with it.

An extreme viewpoint? Maybe. I am so sick of "dealing with it" for everything these days. I'm in my forties and wanted to be done dealing with shit by now. I'm rapidly losing the ability to not have a complete mental breakdown/meltdown over things these days, and that mental barrier I have is getting thinner by the week.

So, I'll let you know what happens, I guess. It's about all I can do.

April Showers, Part V: As Predicted

2026-04-20T13:53:00.001-05:00

As predicted, the AC has died.

I awoke Friday morning around 2, to feeling it blowing/moving no air whatsoever, and I went downstairs and turned it off. It took a few minutes for the system to shut down, but it did finally turn off. I was sure it was out of refrigerant, as even Thursday afternoon and evening I didn't think it was blowing that much cool air.

Luckily, the weekend was much cooler than normal and we were perfectly comfortable. The past two nights we've had the furnace running, even, since it's been so chilly.

Our HVAC company came this morning to take a look. After much discussion, we're likely going to go with a new unit and bite the financial bullet on it. Our home warranty will cover some of the repairs to it, were we to choose repairs -- a new coil and refrigerant refill, and not even all of that -- but it's a 50-year old unit and the home warranty will not cover a replacement, despite an AC being part of what we have a home warranty for...similar to our furnace. No, this will be all on us, just like the furnace was.

Both of us are very bitter about that. While the home warranty has saved us a lot of money on a lot of things over the years, stuff like the furnace and AC, which were supposed to be covered under it, were the main reasons we keep renewing it every year. To have neither of those covered and to have both of them fail in the span of four months is really frustrating and disheartening. It's supposed to be 85 degrees tomorrow and we have no AC to help mitigate that. Daisy will likely need to set up the portable AC we have just to make the upstairs of the house bearable while we wait for the plans for the new unit to be installed.

Yes, that's a thing. The HVAC folks are getting back to us either tonight or early tomorrow morning with a few options and cost breakdowns. We were told that were we to just get it repaired, refilled with refrigerant, and left as-is, it would be something like $2800 all inclusive. To get an entirely new baseline unit without any special bells and whistles (it's not like we have a giant mansion or anything, this is a small two-story house) that would suit our needs, it would only be about $1k more. Costs go up from there for the higher-end models, of course. If I were confident that a major part wouldn't blow on the old unit again I might have been tempted for the repair and refill of coolant, were it a lot cheaper. But it's not, and if we can get a new unit installed and set up for a bit more, then all the better. So that's the option we'll be going with -- one of the new units of some sort. The tech said even the low-end models would be a major upgrade to what we have now, so that sounds promising at least.

So...once they get back to us, we'll pick our option and will go forth with everything as possible. Our HVAC tech was confident they could get someone out this week at some point to do it. The problem is that I do still have to sleep, and have to be able to sleep during the day every day -- that can't be avoided and I certainly just can't be like "well, guess I don't sleep today before I work my eleven-hour overnight shift." While the AC unit is, of course, outside, it's not like them ripping out the old one and putting on a new one will be fast or quiet, and I believe they still need to change out a coil on the inside of the house too, in the furnace closet. Daisy has the option to take VTO -- voluntary time off -- unpaid time, and she may end up doing that just so she can supervise and so I can try to sleep.

Sleep today is a wash; I was awakened around 11-something when the HVAC guy arrived and was not able to get back to sleep since. So, I have a grand total of about 2.5 hours of sleep in me for the day, and I just have to suck it up and deal with it tonight as I work.

This is not the only stress we've had to deal with over the past few days, by the way.

I mentioned earlier that Daisy had a rock fly up and hit her car windshield, sending a big wide crack slowly creeping across it -- and that we had an appointment to have the windshield replacement people come out to put a new one in for us, right in the driveway.

Well...

When said people arrived early on Friday morning, they examined the car and weren't sure they would be able to replace said windshield. Why? Because there is a lot of surface rust on our nearly 20-year-old car, especially at the edge of the roof where the windshield meets the roof, and if that rust had penetrated deep enough, it means the windshield is unsafe and while he could take out the old one, he could not install a new one.

That's right, y'all -- we were told that a dime-sized rock that cracked our windshield could essentially total out our car. If a new windshield couldn't be put in it after the old one was removed, the car would be useless and we'd have to sell it for scrap, because (obviously) you can't have a car without a windshield.

So imagine this scenario -- you haven't slept much, the AC in your house has died, and at 7:45 in the morning there's a glass technician in your driveway telling you that you may need a new goddamn car because a pane of glass in it may be irreplaceable -- and, of course, you also have about five important errands to run that day where, ahem, a windshield is goddamned necessary.

Luckily, the rust was cosmetic only. The glass technician was able to grind it off and seal it (I'm guessing with Rust-oleum or something similar) and he put the new windshield on without issue. So, that's one crisis averted, at least. Had we been forced to essentially go get a new car I am sure I would've lost about 30% of the hair I have left due to stress.

"You watch," I told Daisy, "the first time we take it out after it's been fixed, another rock will fly up and break it again."

This has, thankfully, not happened.

Anyway.

The great purge of 2026 has completed. This afternoon, I finally finished sorting everything and putting it all away in its new places (might as well do something if I can't sleep) and wrapped up the last three bags for one final run to Goodwill. In the end, I believe there were 11 or 12 total full 30-gallon Glad bags of donation clothes that I filled, and I cut my wardrobe roughly in half. There are legit hundreds of hangers scattered around the closet, some of which I will still use and some of which will likely be donated or recycled with everything else.

Through all of it, I looked back on the person I once was compared to the person I am now. So many pairs of shoes and flip-flops were donated, some I'd only worn once or twice and some I had never worn once, still with tags on them. Some of the shoes, especially the unworn ones, were essentially fossilized -- canvas shoes that had become hard as a rock just sitting in storage. I was sort of stunned at that. No, I'd not worn them before, and the ones I had I hadn't touched in ten years or more -- but they felt like they'd turned to stone. I'm sure they could be reworked and softened up again, and I'm sure they'll get a decent home with someone, but that was fascinating to me.

I found two giant packs of tank top undershirts, unopened and unworn. I vaguely remember getting them off Amazon when they were on a deep discount sale many years ago, citing at the time that I'd never not have a use for them, as they're the one item of my wardrobe that wears out faster than any other -- but for the life of me I have no idea how long ago that was. The fact that they've sat there stuffed into a corner, still in their plastic packaging shows what a hoarder of clothing I really was.

Not to be outdone, I found an unopened pack of black thermal (long john) undershirts and an entire unopened 12-pack of the Dickies socks I like as well. I don't remember buying either of those either, honestly. I know I did at some point, but I absolutely do not remember it.

No, I'm not donating any of those, by the way -- I will, eventually, get to them. They were socked away (no pun intended) into the storage tubs with all of my winter clothing, which has now been swapped out for summer shirts in the closet.

As I was going through a lot of my stuff I remembered the person I was when I procured a lot of it, and pondered on how much I have changed since those times. I got rid of some stuff I've had for well over a decade -- not just the shoes but pants, shorts, hoodies, t-shirts. Especially t-shirts. I could not tell you who the man was that purchased all of those things, because he doesn't exist anymore. He existed once, he wanted those things once, and now...he doesn't.

I remember in grad school, easily 15 years ago now, how one of my colleagues said that once you turn 30, it's time to get rid of the band shirts and the comic book t-shirts and cargo shorts, the flip flops and hoodies, and by age 30 how you needed to look more put together and adult. This man, at the time, was I think older than I am now -- he was the oldest member of our graduate studies program and the only one who was on the nonfiction track -- he wanted to be a travel writer, a nature writer. I think I've mentioned this story here before.

While he was a genuinely nice guy, I disagreed with him then and I disagree with that sentiment now. You're going to get older no matter what; how much you choose to "grow up" as you age is entirely up to you. My dad will turn 76 this year and has an incredible comic book and music collection, as well as a large cache of nerdy t-shirts he actually wears. Daisy's father is 78 and almost every time I see him, he's wearing some tie-dyed clothing that he's either acquired over the years or that I've personally made for him. Our mothers, both mine and Daisy's, love the tie-dyes I've made them and wear them all the time. Daisy's mother is older than mine by a considerable degree, and she has purple hair right now, as well as a giant Grateful Dead record collection that I digitized for her last year.

You do you, I say, to one and all. Every year I get more music t-shirts that I adore, on purpose, and wear with pride -- the latest have been the Tragically Hip shirts I've collected over the past year or so, but some others I've acquired recently are shirts displaying Kiss, Ghost, Nirvana, The Traveling Wilburys, Gordon Lightfoot, AC/DC, Poison, Motley Crue, Willie Nelson, The Smiths, and The Beatles -- just to name a few I remember off the top of my head.

Every year now my hair is at least three or four different colors depending on the month and its length.

Every year now I tend to gravitate more towards comfort than fashion. I think I've worn jeans maybe twice over the course of the past year or so -- it's been sweats all other times.

Every year now I care a little less about what I'm supposed to be looking like or dressing like or the attitude or demeanor I "should" be exhibiting for someone my age.

What's important to me is that I have what I need, I am what I need to be, and I am happy.

As the days pass, I'm looking more and more forward to getting to Canada for a week. Yes, I know it's expensive. Yes, I know that travel -- especially international travel -- is long and arduous and takes so very much energy out of me, out of all of us really. But I have fantasies about being in a bed in a basement in a house in another country and knowing that I have zero things to do at that moment aside from play on my phone, read a book, or watch something on my Kindle -- that I am free to eat and sleep and just sink into my environment without having someone else's schedule or responsibilities forced upon me. Five full days of family, togetherness with Daisy, and peace. Days where the rest of the world stops, days where my job will find me inaccessible and out of the country, days where I will sometimes eat authentic Canadian poutine and drink Tim Hortons coffee in the span of only a few hours between them.

Elon Musk says he wants to be the first person to die on Mars; I want to die in Canada. There's a difference.

Not this trip, of course, but when it's actually time for me to kick off this planet, I want it to be up there. I feel more home there than I've felt anywhere, anywhere, in my life. I can't tell you why. I don't know why. I certainly don't have any ancestry (that I know of) from Canada. But, it has a pull on me. It calls to me again and again, and has always called to me more with each visit. Sometimes when I dream, I dream that we're driving those familiar roads around the family homestead and up on Cape Breton Island. I've memorized every turn, every view. I know what the air there smells like, what it feels like. I long for the misting rain on my skin and for the low rumbles of thunder as a storm sweeps over the sea-facing hills. Nova Scotia is the only place I feel I have ever truly belonged.

It also seems like we may be getting a taste of similar weather on Thursday. We've been told by the weather people that Thursday has, at present time, the best chances all season so far for severe weather in the Omaha area.

Now, I take all of this with a grain of salt. We've had severe storm chances multiple times this season already, sometimes significant ones, and it has all gone south and east of us every time so far. But, this is Omaha in April, and in April anything goes for weather here. We've had some of our worst storms and tornado scares in April, pretty consistently, since I've been living up here. So far this year we have been really lucky, but I'll remind you that almost exactly two years ago this week, there was the tornado outbreak that tore up a good chunk of this town, especially north and west of us, that was bad enough to where cleanup crews worked for a few weeks to get all the debris and tree limbs taken care of and to get power restored for those people in the area that got hit hard.

So, we'll see I guess.

Canada Prep 2026, Part I: Semi-Locals

2026-04-13T18:33:00.001-05:00

I am about, ehhhh...60% packed for Canada.

Now, mind you, we don't leave for over two months. That's a long time, all. So much will be different in the next two months.

I generally pack for most possible eventualities when going to Canada, though this time around I'm trying to be a little more frugal and conservative in my packing. I don't like to travel heavy when I go up there, especially when we have access to laundry and a fridge and it's summer. I say this because inevitably I will find some new clothing whether I'm looking for it or not, I will be able to remain entertained and have food I want and can eat and I will be comfortable without issue, so my needs are light. I also do not expect to be vaping anymore by that time, so I won't have to worry about packing vapes.

As for weather, ehhhh, all bets are off generally. June can be iffy and/or volatile both here and in Canada. I've been up there in June when it's been 50s-60s and rainy every day, and I've been there in June when it's been in the 90s and unbearable (the family homestead does not have air conditioning). I packed my thin and light Columbia rain jacket, originally purchased for last year's trip up there but never used, and I may or may not pack a hoodie and/or a pair of actual shoes. To be fair, if I need a hoodie or actual shoes, the Walmart in Port Hawkesbury, ten minutes from the family homestead, will readily sell me either of those items at a very reasonable price, so we'll see and perhaps play it by ear.

I also have to keep in mind that I know who I am as a person, and I will need to reserve space in my luggage for as many bags of ketchup chips and Canadian candy bars that I can cram in to carry home.

Don't look at me like that. Again, I know who I am as a person.

There is a set Canada-centric wardrobe I tend to wear when I'm up there, and it is very mindfully chosen. As I mentioned last year, the last thing I want to do is stick out as a very obvious American, and that mindset is absolutely even more in play this year than it was last year. I also walk a fine line in trying not to look like a tourist, too. We will be up there during "tourism season" for the first time in a couple of years. Now, mind you, I am and am not a tourist at the same time -- we have family there, and at this point it's not like we're looking around at all the sights and sounds, oohing-and-aahing at everything. We're not locals, but we're semi-locals at the very least, anchored there by the family.

At the same time, I also have a torrid love affair with Atlantic Canada and all of its mystical, non-American wonders -- its foods, its Tim Hortons, its culture -- but I am much more silently awed now, and I just embrace it like a warm hug from an old friend.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. Yes, I have a Canada-specific wardrobe. Generally it's clothing that is unassuming and nondescript, clothing that looks like it would befit the people of the area. Plain shirts and plain shorts/pants where applicable, etc. A hoodie either with no logo on it or a workwear logo from a company like Bass Pro Shops or Carhartt (I have neither of these, so my Columbia hoodies had to do last year). However, because I am who I am, I will always toss some flair in there -- this year that flair comes in the form of a couple Tragically Hip t-shirts and my red-and-white maple leaf swim trunks. I don't even know that I'll use the swim trunks while we're there, but as it'll be June and we're never far from a beach, I'm all for it.

Most of the time, my goal is to not draw any more attention to myself than I have to. In a few years, when our country's relationship with Canada is hopefully in a much better place than it is now, I'll likely loosen up a bit and feel more comfortable there in my normal clothing (tie-dyes, baggy board shorts, etc) like I used to do in the old days when I wasn't necessarily concerned about being singled out as American. Until then, though, I try to make myself blend in and look as Canadian as possible. Around the homestead it's not necessarily a problem -- but if we leave the immediate area I have to double-down on looking nondescript and camouflage myself into looking like a local. Sometimes it's harder to do than you think.

In preparation for Canada, as this is the whole point of me writing here at the moment, we have tried to take care of everything we can beforehand -- the pressing, important stuff, anyway. For example, making sure we have travel insurance (especially for Mama) and making sure that we have wheelchair assistance for her. Wheelchair assistance is needed for her because she can't exactly sprint between terminals, and traveling takes a lot out of her -- but also, it's a huge benefit for us because it means we board first (priority boarding, etc).

As an aside, on at least one of the flights, apparently I'm seated in the back row of the airplane. Like, the very last seat in the back. I...actually kind of like that idea, to be honest with you. It means I don't have anyone behind me and I'm guessing there's at least a little more room to stretch out and relax. I don't remember which flight it is, though. Truthfully it doesn't really matter. I think it's the final flight home into Omaha when we return, but maybe I'm wrong.

The Catsitter has blocked off the needed time for us for the trip, so we've already got her ready to roll. We will of course have to pay her and prepare for that, but we have time.

We have scheduled our next doctors' appointments for about a week and a half before we leave. That will give enough time to see whether my doctor wants to increase my dosage of Mounjaro or adjust anything else, and then get another refill of it accordingly.

We have scheduled our AC tuneup for early June, which was the earliest available date -- but I am sure our AC will not last until then as it was running out of refrigerant last summer when we had the last tuneup done. So we will likely have to change that up somewhere, somehow, or have the guys come out to pump some refrigerant into our system to limp it along until our scheduled tuneup where we plan to assess the cost of a brand new unit. It's an inevitability anyhow, eventually. We know almost for a fact that the AC is going to die this summer, and my money is on that it will die sooner rather than later, especially if we keep having 85+ degree days in goddamn April.

Mind you, when I say "die," I don't mean it'll die in the sense that it blows a major part again -- all of those parts have been replaced piecemeal over the past few years -- I mean it'll run dry on refrigerant and will freeze up/won't work anymore until it gets more or until we get an entirely new unit. I know we are eventually going to get a new unit, very likely this summer, as the old one is from 1976 -- but there is a massive cost factor there. So, we have to plan for that as possible, and it is what it is.