Category: Family

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I made it through another anniversary

Two years ago last night, Jerry died. So did a big piece of my heart. Oh, he was a pain in my ass, I suppose I was a pain in his as well. I guess that’s part of relationships. We loved each other and I miss him.

I was a little emotional through the day. I walked the dog, finished de-christmassing the house, made dinner, poured myself a drink and listened to music. I went to bed about the normal time and slept soundly. I do remember some fragments of dreams but nothing coherent.

I didn’t drink to excess. I woke up more or less in a decent mood. 

I haven’t gotten anything much done today. I played on X too damn much. I’m willing to forgive myself for that.

I need to settle down, and to apply for a bunch of jobs. I doubt that I’ll get much if any response. But I feel like I have to try.

As I said, the Christmas tree and associated decorations are all put away. I was able to dispose of a box through consolidation. Going through the decorations was bittersweet.

I have sweet memories of the Christmases Jerry & I spent together.

Each ornament is special and since many of them were saved from the house fire in 2008 there is a greater significance to each.

The house is clean, (except the office,) the amount of stuff remaining to be tossed feels never-ending but I know I’m making progress.

The living, dining, kitchen, and master bedroom are less cluttered. They could all use more de-cluttering but these areas are lighter and more airy. I like it this way.

There is still much to do, and much to get rid of, but where I’m at and the direction I’m moving feels right and good.

The point is, this year while a bit rocky was better than last year. I’m better now and while I still miss him, it’s not the kind of pain it was. I’m stronger and somewhat optimistic.

Perhaps I’m trending toward happy?

 

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None of us should be surprised.

We all knew that he’d do it.

Some people are losing their shit over Biden Pardoning Hunter.

Joe biden hunter inside zoom 1df4b7c6 a6a4 4aac 9355 825ee2676955.Not sure why there’s any surprise about it.

Biden is a father, Hunter is his son, and no father is going to let his son go down if he can stop it. This is especially true if the father in question might be implicated in the son’s illegal activities or maybe directing those activities.

I suppose that people are freaking out because Joe Biden, less than 6 months ago, said that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter. I guess folks are looking at it as Biden lying again. Which is true, Biden has once again very publicly contradicted himself.

Much as I dislike Biden, in this, honestly I can find forgiveness for him.

I choose to put my faith in Karma. I think that punishment will come swiftly to the Biden’s.

Joe will continue to spiral into dementia. Hunter is not going to be welcomed back into the circles that he once moved in, and capitalized on, simply because he has nothing left to sell. Hunter may finally harm himself beyond medical science’s about to help him. Another tragedy waiting to befall the Biden family. The most fortunate person in the Biden’s extended orbit may be Hunter’s un-acknowledged daughter. At least the stigma of the name Biden won’t stick to her.

Jill, in propping Joe up the way she has, destroyed any possibility of them being able to spend his remaining time at a beach in peace. Had she let him retire, he’d have been the former Vice President declining quietly on the beach with national respect for his 40 years service to this country. Lots of folks, myself included, think that she has acted reprehensibly, perhaps to the point of committing elder abuse. I believe she did it for her own vanity, she wanted fame.

Joe’s presidency may well go down as the most epically bad presidency in our nation’s history. This administration has certainly eclipsed Carter. 

I feel sorry for Joe Biden. It’s possible that some good may come out of his presidency. He inadvertently underscored the depth of corruption extant within our government. Trump had called it out but no-one believed him. No-one wanted to believe him. Joe Biden’s bumbling might ultimately have saved us from a level of corruption that was growing in the shadowy netherworld of Washington DC backroom deals and politics.

That’s something for historians to write about a few hundred years from now. By then there should be enough distance to be able to see if the highlighted corruption was eliminated once the people saw it, or if it persisted and grew.

I disagree with Joe pardoning Hunter. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand it.

I think this underscores the hypocrisy that the Biden administration has running through it. It also makes a much stronger case for the rejection of Kamala.

With this historic move Joe Biden may have put the final stake in the heart of the Democratic party.

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Okay, Not how I planed to spend this week.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are multiple fires burning in Southern California.

Tuesday afternoon I got an evacuation notice on my phone. Then, there was a helicopter flying overhead announcing mandatory evacuation. Then there was another evacuation notice on my phone, and finally there was the sheriffs department driving up & down the streets announcing evacuation on their loudspeakers.

Hmm, says I, they must want us to leave.

I suspected it was coming and I’d already planned to stage stuff in the event there was an evacuation. I didn’t get a chance to execute my cunning plan before the evacuation was upon me.

So I grabbed some stuff, put the dog in the car and away we went. 

By the time we left the house, it looked very much like somehow the neighborhood had been relocated to Mars on a very bad day.

Jesse was freaked out and would not settle down.

I was annoyed by that and of course the usual California driving skills or more properly lack thereof.

I made a brief stop, or what was supposed to be a brief stop at a storage locker where I unloaded a bunch of stuff in an attempt to give the dog more room to lie down & relax. This as it turns out was an error.

While I was able to offload, I wasn’t able to get back on the damn freeway. Either the exits were closed, or they were blocked by the aforementioned Excellent California Drivers. Many of whom wouldn’t allow a change of lanes. At least one of whom used the emergency lane to “get ahead” and forced me out of the lane so I was unable to get on the freeway safely. 

Mind you by this point we were 15 – 20 miles away from the evacuation zone and in no danger whatsoever. This was just normal California assholery. It is also the kind of behavior that begets freeway shootings.

I figured “Screw it” and stopped for gas. Then I found a whole string of entrance ramps blocked off forcing me to take surface streets parallel to the freeway until just before Pomona.

Once on the freeway it was a simple matter to get to Orange County and stay with some friends. It’s good to have great friends that will put you up in a pinch. It’s even better to have friends that will put you and your big ass dog up when they have a lovely pet free home and it is pet free for a reason.

My friends have gone above and beyond in this instance and I truly have no idea how to thank them.

At this point I know the firefighters are doing all they can do. I know that there’re no guarantees but I hate not knowing what is likely to happen. Is my house going to burn? Is it not? If it burns, then I have a clear direction. If it’s not going to burn, I’d really rather be home and not imposing on my friends like this.

In an attempt to minimize the mess and stuff that a dog invariably brings into your life, I had Jesse groomed today, while I was at it I had my car washed and my hair cut too. My hope with Jesse being groomed was that he’d shed a little less and wouldn’t be in any way offensive in terms of dog stink.

He’s been sleeping since we got back and I know I’m going to have to take him out on at least one, maybe two more walks tonight.

I don’t really think about it, but having a fenced in back yard is super nice. Their yard is not fenced in, so I’ve been walking Jesse on his leash a lot. Normally Jesse & I go for our morning walk, then I leave the sliders open so he comes and goes as he wishes the rest of the day.

If I move off the mountain, either because of the house burning down, or just because It’s time for me to move on, I will be looking for new digs that have a fenced in back yard after this experience, I’ve decided that is a must have.

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Accessed the other half’s computer today….

That’s always difficult.

It’s stupid, but I feel like I’m somehow violating privacy. He’s dead there’s no reason for him to need or expect privacy but I still feel like somehow I’m intruding.

Aside from the way he stored information on his computer, (to me it seems literally random,) there are other stumbling blocks to get past. The biggest one is that he’d subscribed to pretty much every mailing list on the planet and waiting for his machine to speed up means waiting for the download of all that junk mail to complete.

It had been almost a year since I’d turned his machine on.

I was looking for a student he’d been teaching to play the harp. As I’ve been going through yet more piles of crap, I found a cache of harp music. Sure I could give the music to one of the local harpists. Most of it would probably sit in their libraries, then be forgotten.

Or, I could gift his library to a person he loved teaching. Their lesson time together was always joyful and he was happy for days afterward. The student was marvelous, a quick learner, and impetuous enough to keep him entertained because keeping the lesson on track was a bit like herding cats. That particular student he really had to work hard to stay ahead of.

So it seemed fitting that his library be given to help feed this student’s voracious learning curve. I hope the child’s mother doesn’t think I’m some spammer.

I”d no sooner sent the email & shut his computer down again than an earthquake rolled through. I do hope it wasn’t commentary from on high.

There’s a lot of odd emotional back & forth when I’m sorting through his stuff, his computer is the most difficult for some reason. I feel it going through other things but the computer is the most draining for me.

I decided, after the emotional drain and an earthquake that lunch was necessary. I ate then got a shower & flipped on the boob tube. My intention was to catch up on the news and see if I could get the magnitude and location of the quake.

President Biden was blathering on about SCOTUS and wanting to make changes to the justices terms, He also wants to change the immunity that presidents have. I think he really should think long and hard about that one lest he be “Hoisted with his own petard”.

Joe Biden 1 640x480 1 640x480 1.It doesn’t matter, I can’t stand hearing Biden, Trump, or Harris anymore. I’m equally sick of the left / right members of congress. At this point they’re all liars, the only question remaining is, “To what degree are these bastards lying?”

So the TV was turned off almost as soon as it came on. I did learn that the quake was a 4.9 or so initial magnitude. I’m sure that number will drop because they always do.

I think it will be a while before I turn the other half’s computer on again. I’m not saying there’s a link between president poopy pants blathering on about something, earthquakes, and my use of the other half’s machine.

But well… It couldn’t hurt to treat it like a cursed object.

I think it’s time for a nap!

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Yesterday was pretty good.

I’ve been bordering on being blue for the past few days. 

I don’t really know what’s causing the problem but I’ve been thinking a lot about Jerry, our life together, acknowledging that I was happy and feeling sad about missing him and the goofy life we made.

I was tossing a bunch of little things that were junk when Jerry put them into the junk drawer and they were still junk when I pulled them out of the junk drawer. That man couldn’t throw anything away!

Spring_flowers_2015_longwood_cr_Longwood Gardens L Albee.(I smiled as I typed that.)

Then a wave of sadness washed over me. The dog had been walked, but I felt like I needed to step outside. The sun was warm, the breeze pleasant, and as I looked over the back yard I noticed weeds had sprung up with a vengeance.

I went down stairs with the intent to just do poo patrol. Once I’d completed that chore, I thought, “Might as well do the weed whacking too.”

That felt good. I took all the weeds down to nubs, Then I did the patch of grass & weeds between my fence and the next door neighbor. During one of the winter storms, some limbs had broken off of one of his trees and were laying in the way. I moved them, then cut the weeds which had been growing under the limbs. The battery on the weed whacker died just as I finished the last pass against the fence.

“Great Timing,” I thought as I put the weed whacker away. Slipping the battery into the charger I noticed it was the bigger battery that came with my chainsaw.

This led to checking the oil in the chainsaw, and since I was holding the saw, I grabbed a charged battery pack, shrugged and headed out of the garage. Happily I went out to the side of the house where the limbs lay and started cutting them into small manageable pieces. 

From the winter damage I’ve seen on the tree that lost these limbs, I’m not sure it will survive. That’s sad because it’s a beautiful tree. Similarly, the butterfly bush in front of my house is looking pretty shabby too. I’m hoping it will recover but I’m not holding my breath.

The singing of my chainsaw blade made me happy. I’d noticed some of my neighbor’s Mountain Lilacs were overgrowing the power pole we share. So before he gets an abatement ticket or worse, Edison “Helps’ by butchering the plants, I started pruning.

Well, I had the chainsaw in my hand…  

I cleaned up all the trimmings, came inside covered in sawdust and debris from weed whacking, and asked Jerry if there was anything else I should do before I cleaned up.

Yeah…

My heart stopped for a second. In that breathless moment I figured out part of the blues I’d been feeling.

You see, I always did the outside work.

I can run the snow thrower and always could. In winters, Jerry wanted to help and contribute. But Jerry had shitty balance, doubly so on ice, so we agreed that he ran the snow thrower. I was pleased with this arrangement because while he was holding onto the machine, the odds of a fall were greatly reduced.

When It came to yard work, trimming, digging, planting, painting, and that kind of stuff. I did the work, Jerry supervised. He made sure that I was staying hydrated, and wasn’t out in the sun for too long.

Jerry told me enjoyed watching me working in the yard. He said I looked hot, and he liked my confident strut and my confidence while using the tools.

At the time, I’d never thought that I could be hot looking doing chores. For me, it was just chores. Other guys, looked hot doing construction, or farming, or whatever. I never thought about myself that way, but I was happy knowing I was good enough for him.

I suppose what I’d been secretly dreading was this “first” spring.

Last year, I was just going through the motions still “numb” from his passing.

This year, I’m getting back to something like “normal” and those normal things remind me what’s missing.

One “missing” ritual is this. In the first days of Spring, We’d have discussions about planting spring flowers, or changes in the yard, and trimming of various shrubs and trees. Sometimes there wasn’t much discussion, Jerry would come home with flats of flowers and ask me to plant them. I’d do it because I enjoyed the work and because the flowers made him smile.

It’s that time of year and probably why there was a bit of a sting yesterday. This is a part of the healing process. It’s just going to take time.

The good news is that being outside and doing the usual, normal work felt really good. There’s more to do, but I wanted to see what my arms and shoulders felt like before using the pole saw on some Cottonwood trees that are spindly and overhanging my fence line.

The other good news is that I’m not blue today, it seems a little yard work was all it took to make the blues disappear.

Maybe I’ll go look at some flowers up at the hardware store.