Tag: Family

Posted on

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?

 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.

Posted on

WOW! Apple does it again! Not in a good way!

Apple one icons logo 100857611 largeThe other half and I decided to go with the Apple One subscription back when they first started it. 

Both of us were paying for Apple Music and individual iCloud Storage. We’d purchased Apple TVs for the living and bedrooms, but Apple’s original programming wasn’t anything we were interested in at the time. 

I knew that I was going to be interested in Foundation when Apple released the first season.

When we did the math, we found we were already spending nearly the initially high 29.95 monthly fee for Apple One individually, since we could share the Apple One subscription we went for it.

Honestly we were only interested in the Music and iCloud storage. There was a high probability that Apple TV+ would become interesting to me. Although to date I’ve only watched Foundation and Invasion. There are some Apple produced movies that looked somewhat interesting but not enough to captivate my attention so that I sat down and spent 2 hours of my life watching them. 

I was interested in the Apple Fitness guided training. I’ve used it a few times just to get a feel for it. At first it only worked on the Apple TV so training had to take place in the Living Room or the Bedroom. Honestly, that didn’t really work. Since then Apple has expanded the functionality to iPhone and iPad so it’s a little more portable.

It’s understood that Apple is a “Woke” company. Okay, that’s fine, I’ve always known Apple was full of blue haired people with so many piercings they can’t get through a TSA metal detector. However, recently I thought I’d get more familiar with Apple Fitness and take advantage of regular workout routines during the Winter. 

Opening the Fitness+ tab on the Apple TV I was a little put off.  It wasn’t that DEI was front and center, it was.

It was that so many of the workouts appeared to be geared for way younger folks than I am. After some digging I was able to find some things geared toward older adults. I’ll try a sampling to see if Apple Fitness+ is for me.

The other half and I also liked being able to share our purchases and subscriptions to many applications.

Neither of us cared about Apple Arcade, we were adults, while I looked at some of the games, none were interesting to me and so that part of the Apple One subscription was never used.

Apple News+ is okay but neither of us were really interested in much of the magazine offerings and I literally locked out of my news feed, the extremist news organizations both left and right. The other half eventually got tired of News+ and stopped using it altogether. I know this because he needed help turning off all the News+ notifications. He generally preferred BBC and NPR until the age of COVID. Then he, like me, found  very few news organizations that passed the reliability test.

At this point I could take or leave Apple News+

All of this has come to mind because of a few things.

1) The other half is dead.
2) Apple One increased its prices from 29.95 which was already expensive to 32.95 back in spring. At the time, I wasn’t capable of making too many decisions and chose to let that go.
3) Apple sent a notice of another rate increase either Friday Night or Saturday morning, (which is kind of chicken shit,  because NONE of the executives will be in over the weekend so the folks answering the phones get to take the brunt of the complaints,) The new rate is 37.95 a month.

At this new rate, we’re starting to approach old Cable TV rates. (Yes I know the Cable TV people charge far more obscene rates these days. That’s why I don’t have Cable.) As a point of interest, that’s also why I’m looking at new places to live where I can receive local TV with a damn antenna. I don’t even care if it’s only one channel as long as it’s in English. (Where I live now, I can receive one channel but it’s in Korean? or Chinese neither of which I speak.)

I know I’m not getting $37.95 value out of the Apple One subscription. I no longer have a family. (I do have a family but they don’t live with me and have their own stuff going on. It’s a big pain in the ass or was, to merge this stuff or unmerge it, if necessary.) The merge / unmerge task is so daunting, my other half is still listed in family sharing on the account. Although in truth, I’m not ready to remove him. It seems so final and I’m not ready for that yet.

The problem is that when I look at what I”m actually using regularly, and try to break out only those items, I come up with a cost that’s about the same as Apple One. Obviously this pricing structure is to keep Apple One subscriptions. 

As an older person, I don’t want to spend any more money than I have to. Well, I never wanted to spend more money than I had to. The problem for me now is that since I”m not employed, and living on retirement, I am far less loose with my money.

I’m sure there are a lot of people in the same boat I am. We’re either retired or nearing retirement and being forced out of our jobs explicitly, or surreptitiously. (Ask one of my friends about his experiences after 25 years or more with the same company. Ageism is real. Oh, and by the way, there’s nothing you can do to fight it! The law may be on your side, but lawyers… You’re lucky to get one of them to return your call or email! Maybe the next time I reach out to an attorney, I’ll say Trump did something to me. Perhaps then I’ll be worth calling back!)

In any case, all of us in this position are re-evaluating where our money goes and trimming the fat. If only we could trim the fat of taxation that gets us very little of use in our daily lives but might just drop a nuke in our backyards…

I digress.

Apple One has become too damn expensive! So effectively older folks or poor people are completely priced out of the Apple One service. DEI my ass!

I’ll evaluate Apple One for the next month or two. Maybe it’s time to cut this shit down to only what I find useful. If we can’t come to an arrangement that works for me, then maybe it’s time for me to stop paying for Apples services entirely.