Tag: family

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Coronavirus

We got up this morning and Autumn tried scrambling some eggs because she suddenly has an interest in a culinary class at votech. She basically protested the entire time Summer was telling her to cook breakfast, and she hates every food, but I’m trying to be positive and supportive. I took Noah to work and then went home for a while. Evidently I was exhausted, because I laid down and napped for a few hours before waking up pretty disoriented. I got progressively more phlegmy as the day went on, but hoped it was my usual allergy/CPAP combo.

I played a little Overwatch to wake up, cleaned up after the cat, and took a shower before heading back up to Summer’s. She made some chicken spaghetti since Walmart was completely out of ground beef, and it turned out really great. I helped by making some garlic bread, and all the kids seemed to really like the meal. After we ate, Autumn wanted to play some Monopoly, so we went a few rounds until Summer had to go to bed.

I stayed up and played a little Overwatch to earn some loot boxes while Noah and Eaddie stayed up watching scary movies. By the time I was ready for bed, I had quite a bit of junk in the top of my chest making me constantly clear my throat. Hopefully this isn’t the end of us all.

It’s funny how the “essential” employees that have to work all week during the pandemic closure are paid the least.

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Come at Me, BrOVID-19

I tried sleeping in this morning, and though my bed felt pretty luxurious, I couldn’t get back to sleep once I was up. I called Summer and met her at the gym for about a half hour walk on the treadmill. Then I went home to clean up before meeting her, Eaddie, and Noah at the new Cicis to try and catch the novel coronavirus. It was evidently their opening weekend, so the parking lot and insides were completely packed. They managed to keep the bar loaded, but the pizza types were boring, and the bar didn’t seem as big. They put the salad stuff up front, but it didn’t appear to have as much stuff either. Overall I was pretty disappointed. I don’t like having to put in custom orders, but I guess now I have an excuse to ask for one made with every single topping they offer.

After lunch, Summer took Autumn to her play practice, and Noah and I met her back at Walmart to do a little shopping. That place was packed too, presumably from pandemic panic. We even ran into my parents while wandering around. They were out of a ton of stuff, including all paper toiletries, all hamburger meat, and tons of canned or dry goods. As we were checking out, they made an announcement over the intercom that they had a small cart of hand sanitizer located at the front of the store. We turned around to see a cart guarded by employees as they only allowed a couple per household.  You could definitely tell people had gone completely bonkers. It was all over everyone’s faces.

Noah left with some friends while we were there, so Summer and I took our groceries back home and chatted some more until Autumn finished. I went to get her, stopped by my house for a few more things, and then came back up the hill. She went to bed super early, so Summer and I watched Master of None until Eaddie got home from her birthday trip with Maleea. Noah eventually got home as well, we ate some leftovers, and then when Noah went to sleep, Eaddie joined us in the bedroom for a couple episodes of Glee. She was the best snuggle buddy tonight.

A pocket full of posies!

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Homecoming

I got a couple more hours of sleep after the super late night last night. Getting out of bed for work was pretty hard, and I ended up getting in about 20 minutes late. I forgot my badge and had to use the security app to unlock the outside door to get in.

I stopped by the shop first to give Ben an old Windows 95 programming book and helped Zach factory reset  his Pixel 3 after the home button broke from his new OS update. Then I went to the high school to take care of a few work orders. I almost didn’t make it back to the shop before lunch.

I convinced Allen to take me to Zaxby’s since I rode the bike, and shortly after we sat down, Zach, Gary, Greg, and Josh all walked in, having independently chosen Zaxby’s for lunch.

My afternoon was a little more scattered in some ways, but for the most part I was able to focus on 1:1 laptop repairs. Jesica called to check in, and then I ended up staying a little late to make up for my late arrival by swapped out a bad computer. Brandie called me to catch up on the drama after I got home, and I explained my conversations with Summer over the past couple days, as well as our slow arrival back to something positive.

The girls had a band fundraiser at Chick-fil-A, so I met them there and had a salad for dinner. Erica made it through the drive-through and made eyes, so that’ll have to be a conversation soon. I hate getting egg on my face, but frankly there are too many good and correct things happening to ignore. While I refuse to maintain a Hopgoodian relationship, I think this one really didn’t need as much work as we might have thought.

Summer took Autumn home after dinner to do some homework, and then met Eaddie, Maristella, and me back at Steak ‘n Shake for BOGO shakes to share. She took Maristella home, and I eventually got Noah from work, and we crashed a bit late, but hopefully for a better night of sleep.

That’s an easy incompatibility to account for if you just stop to rewind occasionally.

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Lawdy, Lawdy

I couldn’t sleep again last night, save for a couple periods of maybe an hour or so where I lost some time and dozed a bit. I was wide awake long before my alarm, and got to witness the entire wake cycle for my lighting, which was actually kind of neat. I was much less groggy than I expected to be, and I made it work.

I got to my office for just a minute before going to a classroom to check on a projector. Then I had to go to the shop for a lamp that I didn’t have in my office. Along the way, I felt compelled to stop by Oakland for a little extra love, though I didn’t stay long. I got to the shop and chatted with Gary for a little bit before discovering we didn’t have any of the model bulb I needed, so from there I went to Melinda to try and get some ordered.

We chatted for quite a while, and she turned out to be way more holy-rolly than I expected. It seemed to come up everywhere I turned today, and I hated that this was the automatic response. It made sense for other people to look to their faith in their trying times, but not only am I past that time in my life, this situation has been completely different for me. Sure, it’s been rough, but my level of acceptance and the way I’ve coped has been, as far as I’m concerned, phenomenal. I’ve felt stronger in myself, more focused, more decisive, and overall braver.

Eventually the other guys started filtering in, and Allen, Zach, and Gary convinced me to go to Wendy’s where I just had a cup of chili and a chocolate Frosty-ccino. By this time, even the chili felt like too much, and I left wishing I had gotten the small. I figured I could use the lull of the depression stage of my grief to start a habit of eating less and doing more.

After lunch, Ben showed up and we chatted for a while. Then I bounced around some more in the shop. At the end of the day, he came back and talked to me about some decisions to make in the new lease, and then just like that, the day was over.

I went to get gas, then stopped by AT&T to see who I could pester. Mayra and Kevin were both there, and we caught up a bit. Then it was on to my parents’ house to tell them about my week over some shrimp soup. As parents, they wanted to reassure and defend me, but I had already made up my mind to just accept things and move on. We talked a bit more, and then I headed home.

Bâc Ván was in the garden trimming plants in the dark, so I chatted with her for a while about some of her issues and some of mine. Eaddie had texted me yesterday like some kind of loan shark asking for her money. I always collected the cash she threw around the house carelessly, and she wanted it back. I was almost proud of how it reminded me of myself in her practicality. I did some quick mafs and hit up Summer with a money request. She denied it almost immediately and I became slightly concerned, but then she texted and seemed to just want me to handle Eaddie’s cash on my own instead of deducting it from what she owed me. The money request quickly over tripled in size and she paid it without hesitation. I got to work loading up their bicycles and hit the road.

When I got there, I got some things off of my chest before Eaddie came out to collect her money. That is when she absolutely melted my face. That girl always played it so close to her chest, but she came out and said some things. I said some things. And then I lost. My. Fucking. Marbles. It was like she said to me every single thing I had ever longed to hear in my entire life. She hugged me and held my hand and stood there to talk to me for so long. I hadn’t even been ambushed or bamboozled. This girl just always played it cautiously like I did, and it was like we finally understood that we were both in the exact same place all along.

Summer and I had a go at conversation, and though not restored, we were at least reconciled. She ultimately agreed to counseling to help nail down her own issues, and we agreed that we should continue to talk as people who deeply care for one another. Times are confusing and uncertain, but it is a Wednesday after all.

I never could get the hang of Wednesdays.

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Dear Summer,

I envy that in all of your own troubles and pain and suffering, you managed to hold on to what I had lost so long ago in my own years-long wars. You seemed to earnestly believe that you could fall in love with prince charming and have everything fall into place so perfectly, and you fawned over me more than any person ever should. In that fantasy, you sometimes had trouble making things work in a practical sense, but your struggles appeared to be my strengths. For years upon years when all I wanted to do was die, focusing on practicality and making the day-to-day work was what kept me alive. Ultimately I felt like your emotional strength and devotion met with my practicality and wit, allowing us to grow stronger together, into a proper, functional family. What you felt was weakness in our differences, I perceived as strength in the breadth of our combined skillset.

It’s no secret that cynicism and sarcasm are my strongest and most prevalent defense mechanisms. I’m not so bad, after all, if everything else is awful too. I seldom speak those things as true and honest feelings, though I understand how someone could take them to heart. I doth joke too hard and too negatively, but it keeps me sane, I think. There are three truths to every situation: your truth, my truth, and the actual truth. Neither of us can ever truly know the truth apart from our own without some trust in the other, so I’m afraid I’ll never really understand the causality. Did my cynicism truly drive you away from me? Or were we never meant to last, and my darkened heart proved itself yet again in protecting me from further harm? After years of struggling with a very real addiction to Sarah and her emotional manipulation, I was left broken in so many ways. Not all of those wounds healed completely, and even if they did heal, you might not recognize them for all the calluses. I knew that I would never survive another trip through that level of darkness, and so in order to protect myself and my own family from what I understood as my own ultimate demise, I found strength where I could. I survived tonight because of how jaded my relationship with Sarah made me. And just like that, somehow I’ve credited that wretch for saving my life.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you’re just left paralyzed, in which case everything pretty much just sucks. I would rather the end of our relationship be an inevitability, and credit my dark humor for saving me, than accept the thought that I drove you away with my own misgivings. I couldn’t let you into my heart quickly enough because I was terrified of exactly what happened tonight. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I wholly trusted a “completely innocent” interaction and later learned it to be the complete opposite. It’s literally my greatest fear in a relationship, and you knew this. Finding you having dinner at Umami with that guy brought me right back to ground zero, and I have to say I handled it like a goddamn champ. I didn’t want to revert back to that suspicious, jealous me that I had given up eight years ago, but there we were. Even if it was completely innocent to you, and you just needed a friend, it should absolutely NEVER have been some random guy you know through work that I’ve never even heard of. If it had been a male friend like Alex that you had known for years, I would have 1,000% understood. As it was, I knew that you had already made up your mind that I was old news, and it was obvious because that motherfucker ghosted you AS SOON AS HE SAW MY FACE. Even if you play naive again, he knew exactly what he was getting into, and for that, shame on him.

I never thought I’d be saying, “goodbye,” forever, but I think that is because I am an idiot. They told me actions speak louder than words, so I physically put myself into your home to make it our home, and my own house became a very strange place for me. Regardless of what idiocies came from my mouth, I continually tried to put myself where it really counted. It was hard and overwhelming a lot of the time, but I kept coming back because I thought it was worth the steep learning curve. Ultimately I guess you had bigger fish to fry. At least I was honest from the beginning when I asked if you were looking for Mr. Third-Time’s-a-Charm. I don’t need superficial symbols because I show my devotion with actual honesty, presence, and inclusion in family, and I expect my partner to respect me and mine well enough to verbally decline unwanted advances. It’s a pity you didn’t really want to be a part of mine, because they’re a pretty great family most of the time.

You can’t expect your boiled-over, emotional diatribes to function as productive adult conversations. I was very honest in that I knew I had a lot of growing to do. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for me, and I thought that I had adequately expressed that to you as well. I suppose I could have done more to initiate the conversations, but who has the time when you’re busy parenting teenagers. Blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day you have to learn how to express what you’re feeling in some kind of meaningful way. You can’t outwardly express that everything is perfect and expect your partner to accept that with eager arms, then get upset over all of the combined little things. You literally went from “I would marry you tomorrow” to “dinner with schmuck” in a week’s time, and so for that reason, I’m out.

I just want someone to scratch my head for a while and tell me I’m not so irrevocably broken that I can’t maintain a real, adult relationship ever again.

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Little John Mountain

We got up a little early this morning so we could have a day up on Petit Jean. Summer took Autumn to get things to make sandwiches while I went home to clean up. Then the girls and my dad met at my house so we could drive up the mountain. We went up the back way and stopped at the bear cave trail first, where we had lunch in the back of the car. It was cool, but great weather to be out in the wilderness. We climbed up on some of the rocks where we found some chiseled out steps, and I collected a few mosses, and Dad took a bunch of pictures of nature. Autumn didn’t originally want to go at all, but once we were there she insisted that her knee was fine to continue trailblazing and climbing up rock faces.

The next stop was Mather Lodge to clean up a bit, and then we continued to the Cedar Falls overlook. As the day progressed, it seemed to get windier and cooler, but the rain never showed up. Summer wanted to go to a new coffee shop on the mountain, so we had some drinks while the girls played Scrabble. Then it was off to the Petit Jean gravesite. That’s where it was the coldest with the most wind. I don’t think Eaddie really put anything together in her head for the homework she had on the subject, but it was still a nice day to get out of doors. It was personally very aggravating to feel how I’ve aged since I last spent any significant amount of time hiking, and I think Dad felt the same way. I guess the best thing any of us can do is keep at it to maintain dexterity.

We took the interstate back home, which felt quite a bit longer, and definitely more boring. Dad and Summer each went home while the girls stayed with me to watch TV while I started some laundry. Once that was done, Summer came back and we met my parents at Bocadillo for a birthday dinner and ice cream. Mom didn’t seem too happy that it wasn’t the same type of Mexican place they usually visit, but I thought it was good. Afterward we got some dessert and I split a strawberry and cream funnel cake with Summer and Eaddie that was just divine.

With this year’s birthday plans out of the way, I took the girls back to their car and went to Amanda’s to check on her cats one last time. Then it was back home to finish up some laundry before bed.

I’ve really taken a lichen to you.

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Dungeons & Dragons & Knights, Oh My!

I got up this morning and warmed up some leftovers as Summer motivated the kids to start chores. Eventually she left for a manicure and the gym, and I went home to do some cleaning up myself. I had to stop by Amanda’s first to check on the cats, then went home and took care of my own. I did a little quick maintenance on the fish tanks as well, and made time for a couple rounds of Overwatch with Johnny.

The evening snuck up on me pretty quickly, and I headed back to Summer’s for our night of Dungeons & Dragons with Travis, John, and Melissa. I stopped by Dollar General for some snacks first, then we made our way up the hill. The two kids didn’t show up, but I think overall it was better for it. We had only really done one little short prebuilt campaign before, so this was our first time with character sheets and the like, and I think it stressed Travis out a little too much. We ended up quitting really early and just sat around quietly visiting for a little longer before going home.

Summer crawled into bed pretty quickly with Autumn, so I started the old musical Camelot that I picked up with some Amazon digital credits. I remembered precious little of the movie from my very early childhood, but it’s always stuck in my mind, so I figured why not burn some free credits on it. Eaddie started to watch it with us, but then almost immediately left when she realized what it was. Autumn fell asleep to it really early as well. Summer made it a little over halfway before asking if it was some kind of 4-hour feature, so we quit there.

Never be too disturbed if you don’t understand what a woman is thinking. They don’t do it very often!

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Tron of the Jumbo Variety

I spent a while this morning trying to reverse engineer the closed circuit television system in the arena. I didn’t actually get it working as they expected, but I did get to control the Jumbotron for a bit in my experimentation.

Summer had a moment to get away from work and have a salad with Ronda and me at Ruby Tuesday, where the stench still lingered all through the bar area. After lunch, I mostly worked on things in my office until quitting time.

When I got home, I played a little Overwatch, did a little cleaning, then picked up the girls from karate. Summer cut up a bunch of fresh fruit and veggies for dinner, and then we had a long heart-to-heart until bedtime.

You felt the gravity of tempered grace falling into empty space.

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Pancakes on Pancakes

Summer took Autumn to Stoby’s this morning so she could prep for their Explorers fundraiser. Then the rest of us got up and headed down for all-you-can-eat pancakes. The food was simple, but filling. We didn’t stay long since Noah had to go to work. We stopped by Amanda’s so I could bring some packages in for her, and then went to my house until Autumn was done.

Summer took him to work while I showered, and then we watched some Glee. The breakfast lasted until around 2, so we went to Walmart to kill some more time until Autumn finished. Then we picked her up and headed home. I kept fussing at her that I was hungry, and that she should make us dinner after having worked for half a day. Unsurprisingly she passed on the opportunity. We watched some more Glee until dinner time, then I grilled some more burritos.

After we ate, Summer wanted to play some Catan, but we quit at 7 points since the kids were fussy and needed to go to bed anyway.

I will trade you one random lumber card for five lumber.

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Fish and Burritos

We didn’t do much this morning. The kids ate whatever frozen food they could find, and I picked at some leftovers. Eventually I left for home as Summer went in for work, and the kids were left with a bunch of chores to avoid.

I played some Overwatch for a while before eventually taking a shower. The Reddit email digest I received today had a listing for some Salvinia minima in Arkansas, so I reached out and found out she happens to be in town, so hopefully I’ll have a local aquascaping friend soon.

As Summer got off of work and headed to the gym, I ran by Casey’s to discover they were out of their freebie, then continued on to Walmart to get dinner. Epic burritos are relatively cheap, quick, and easy. I managed to get most of the food ready before Summer made it home, and then I rolled and grilled burritos in a skillet. The kids wanted to watch Return of the Jedi with us, but fell asleep about halfway through. I guess sitting around watching TV and playing video games all day really tired them out.

Burrito in; burrito out.