In which I need to vent or cry or complain or get a hug or something.
Bindu kept me up much of last night with terrible episodes involving screaming (the vet calls it “vocalizing”) and panting and whimpering and coughing; she’d calm down and almost sleep in between, but every couple of hours it would start all over again. Her squeal would have me leaping from bed to comfort her and pet her until she seemed to stabilize; in the process I’d end up working myself into a full-blown anxiety attack with the shakes and the clammy palms and the achey skin and the inability to get back to sleep and the whole nine yards.
She woke me up again at a quarter after seven; she was panting a little and looking haggard, but she was upright and clearly ready to start her day, so could I please get my human ass up and remove the blockade at the top of the stairs so she could get on with it? I petted her and asked her to wait 15 minutes for the animal hospital to open (no one had answered when I’d called at three and again at four in the morning, but their office hours begin at 7:30). I made an appointment, got dressed, gathered my things, and carefully carried my dog downstairs and then outside.
She seemed spry enough, and promptly peed… and then she walked about fifteen paces and started with the squeal/cough/pant thing again. She seemed to be in pain and looked abjectly miserable. IT FUCKING SUCKED. I put her in the truck and, still hoping it was a back problem that pain meds could resolve, drove her to the vet and checked her in, explaining that she’d once had a back episode and that her behavior reminded me of my ex-husband’s when he ruptured a disc. They asked me to approve radiographs and sedation; I approved blood work too because of her age (she’s ~14).
When I got home around nine, I promptly curled up in bed with a pillow over my head and crashed for two hours.
The vet called me with an update around one o’clock. Blood work, in areas I can’t explain that have something to do with poor organ function, indicates problems. The radiograph shows an enlarged heart and an enlarged liver. The vet wanted to do an ECG to find out more about the heart problems; for lack of anything better to do I said okay. Due to various factors (distended belly, coughing, drinking lots of water), the vet also suspects an endocrine condition called Cushing’s disease as well. Secondary blood work and ECG will need to be evaluated, she said, offsite.
The vet reported that Bindu doesn’t seem to have arthritis or a sore back, and that her discs looked good in the radiograph. Therefore, it seems that last night’s episodes – and the first one I noticed the day before, and the one G’ma noticed the day before that – were not actually due to pain from a slipped disc or back-related spasming, which is what I’d suspected, but from heart failure. (Most of the time, I was told, such episodes cause fainting, but in some dogs who fail to actually faint they manifest as “vocalizing, stiffness, panting and coughing.”)
Essentially, I’m waiting on another $90 test, one I don’t really need, to tell me that my dog is in the process of dying.
~+~+~
Last week I received an email from my advisor notifying me of a lecture today. I was pretty excited about it, after the disappointment of learning that my curriculum was all online. An actual in-person lecture, on campus, with people!
The Bindu thing dampened my enthusiasm a great deal, but I was grateful for something to do to help me occupy my mind. No one needs to know that I nearly burst into tears twice on the drive over there.
When I got to the lab, the whiteboard said the instructor was out sick and that there were no classes today.
~+~+~
Last month, when I went to Planned Parenthood to get a bladder infection treated, they shortlisted me for a free mammogram program. So I went and got my boobs smashed and shortly afterward I received a lovely letter telling me that I don’t have breast cancer.
Today, I got a bill for $86.
~+~+~
There was some kind of SNAFU in my client’s A/P department and my September 23rd invoice never got processed. I was assured last week that it would be paid Monday.
Today’s Thursday, I’ve just dropped a couple hundred bucks I don’t have on the vet, I owe St Mary’s ninety bucks, my settlement program is unpaid, and I have a $300 tuition payment due on the 20th. I haven’t paid my rent, either.
Guess who’s check wasn’t in the mail today?
~+~+~
I should be studying or working, but I’ll probably just sit here, freaking out and trying not to, until the vet calls back.
~+~+~
They called back. The voicemail says the ECG is done but they won’t have the results until tomorrow, and that I can come pick Bindu up.
Except that I can’t handle another night like last night, and I have no reason to believe that tonight will be different as there has, as yet, been no treatment for the symptoms I took her in for. The vet wanted the ECG and offsite blood work results before prescribing anything.
God, am I the worst dog mom in the world if I leave her there so I can sleep without listening to her wails? I can’t stand her suffering, but leaving her in a cage in a concrete room overnight seems like a sin. But if I bring her home, I’ll carry her up and down the stairs to save her the strain and have a panic attack every time she falls down and coughs, and as much as I won’t want to admit it all I’ll want to do is get away from her.
Oh, God. I always told you I would be a total wreck when this, the end of Bindu’s life, came along, and I totally am.
~+~+~
Update: I cried. Then I meditated. Then I called the clinic and said that I am “unable” to pick Bindu up until tomorrow. (I made it sound like I didn’t have access to a vehicle right now, which is completely untrue.) So, not only am I a bad dog mom who leaves her beloved to spend the night in a cage in a concrete room across town, but I’m a liar as well.
I am not pleased with myself, but this is not the first time since developing a panic disorder that I’ve been displeased with my responses to things. Usually when I’m freaking out I just suit up and go do whatever it is anyway (I don’t even know how many times I’ve done gigs in the throws of a full-blown panic attack), but I know that another night with a screaming, coughing, panting dog in my arms will… — it will, um… — hell, I don’t even know what it’ll do. I don’t have words for it. I just don’t want to do it. Even though it’s my duty, because I took responsibility for that dog’s life and health and comfort over a decade ago.
There may be treatment options, once there’s a diagnosis, I just don’t know anything about cost or efficacy, and she is 14 so none of this is entirely unexpected.
As G’ma has just returned from her afternoon volunteering at the museum, I’ve shared all the vet information with her. I told her I’d left Bindu at the clinic overnight even though they said I could come get her. Then I teared up. G’ma said, “We care too much about the little buggers. We might not show it, but we really do.” And then she went and made a cocktail and brought it to me here at my desk. For my part, I struggled not to start crying until she’d gone back upstairs.
In which I had a superfun birthday week, and here are the digital images to prove it!
sun – Watched NOVA online and knitted and basically recovered from the previous day’s gig. Watched an awesome Bollywood flick.
mon – Worked, but only two hours because there was an outage. Didn’t study AT ALL. Bought dog food and got my eyebrows waxed. Took a weird and unnecessary nap in the evening hours, thereby messing up my sleep schedule YET AGAIN.
tues – Briefly hosted The Ed & Sean Show! as they took showers and bought me lunch and left. My dad wished me a happy birthday via IM. I ordered a battery for the Dell laptop.
wed – My birthday! I meditated all morning (where ‘morning’ = ‘right after I got up at about one in the afternoon’); it was awesome. My mom sent me this awesome tea set from my Wishlist:
At dusk, I rode my bike to Pioneer Park and looked at ducks.
In the evening I went out with friends and did karaoke and ate tofu veg at the Golden Horse and didn’t buy a single drink and got smashed.
thur – Slept all day, recovering from the birthday drunkenness. Oof. Luckily my employer didn’t have any work for me anyway.
fri – Rode my bike to the store! Bought groceries! Made fuul!
Went to the Peony. Walked from there to Sapolil with Becca to see Miriam’s Well. The Ed & Sean Show returned! Walked to the Red Monkey, then to the GoHo. Got trashed again!
Walked all the way home! Made breakfast! Stayed up until The Ed & Sean Show left at six in the morning!
sat – Slept all day.
IN CONCLUSION: I got drunk twice, invoiced only three hours (thank God my UI claim is still open), wore punjabis and bindis in public, got an awesome tea set from my Wishlist, and did less than two hours of coursework: I’d say Birthday Week was an epic win (where ‘epic win’ = ‘got nothing useful accomplished’)! Whoo hoo!
In which there’s a blues festival.
Saturday morning my alarms went off at 5:35 and 5:45 respectively. I showered, dressed, grabbed my gig bag and walked out the door at 6:15. IN THE MORNING. After sleeping maybe two hours.
Curt and Cookie picked me up, we grabbed breakfast at McDonald’s and drove to Richland, where we transferred to Tim’s truck and continued driving.
At the festival, we played the cafe at 12:35 and the main stage at 3:40. The crowd was appreciative and the sets were fun. Mineral, WA is lovely and the weather was perfect.
Then we drove home.
I spent ten hours in the car yesterday!
The Flickr set, such as it is, is here.
In which I finally googled the Tea Party because I wasn’t entirely sure what its deal was.
I’ve heard some great arguments from intelligent, white, upper-middle class males about how pretty much everything is skewed against them: they’re literally the only segment of society not protected, somehow, from something. Everybody hates them because they’re white, male, and not poor. I can see how that might be a drag, to be forever the bad guy just because you’re succeeding and you’re not somehow handicapped.
That said, this makes me somehow nervous:
The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April 2010. They are wealthier and better-educated than the general public.
Why does this description frighten me? Am I just socialized against rich white men, or do I really happen to think that they’re kinda bad people? Especially when they seem pissed off?
Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.
Why should the government be helping the rich? Have we not come to believe that there is something inherently unbalanced about the distribution of wealth on this planet?
The overwhelming majority of [Tea Party] supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites; compared with 11 percent of the general public.
They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.
I don’t know who these “most Americans” are. Mr. Obama seems to me to share my values, and the values of many of the people I know. Maybe if I were an old, rich, white male I’d feel differently? (Maybe if I had something to lose, I’d be upset if I felt that it was threatened. The nice thing about not having much is that you’re not worried about losing it.)
When did racism become fashionable among rich married white dudes?
And what, exactly, are “the problems” of rich, white, educated men? Why should the government care about them more than the problems of, say, people who are without resources?
Tea Partiers embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person’s income to provide for another’s health or well-being.
And when Mr. Paul and his Tea Party supporters espouse “constitutionally limited government,” they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document. Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans. – “Tea Party Movement,” New York Times
The government should not be the vehicle by which poorly-distributed wealth is redistributed. Well, I can kind of understand that:
G’ma is of the opinion that a lot of what we term societal problems are directly due to things like welfare; in the old days, she says, no nice girl got knocked up, because there was no one to take care of her if she did. Such things just weren’t done, because you had to face your family. Now days, you can get knocked up, go on welfare, live in a subsidized apartment… you can move halfway across the country, if you want, and let strangers take care of you. Hence the broken family, she says, and from there a general societal deterioration resulting in a culture obsessed with spending money it doesn’t have on cheap crap it doesn’t need, an inability to save and/or live within its means, and vast armies of homeless with no one to care for them but the government. All of these symptoms are, she believes, directly traceable to welfare programs.
She’s also told me about some of the charities she’s been involved in for fifty or sixty years and how they don’t really do much any more. One used to collect and distribute food to the poor; now they can’t due to various safety laws (food has to be professionally prepared or packaged or it can’t be donated to the poor). With welfare, charity stopped being an individual’s duty and became the government’s job.
Making government smaller, cutting the programs that make it more father than a function, well, it does seem like a good idea. But when I take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, I’m still a liberal, so maybe I haven’t yet made my peace with that. After all, I’ve always lived in a welfare state and I don’t know any different. (On the other hand, I score 54 – “You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.” – on the Libertarian Purity test.)
I can’t help but wonder if it’s even possible to go back. Furthermore, I’d really rather cut military spending than social programs first. (How does it make any sense at all that the U.S.’s military spending is this fucking high?)
Anyway, in conclusion: I agree that the government is too big. I disagree that it should be more concerned with the problems of rich white men, but only because I’m not a rich white man. And I still can’t believe that people like Sarah Palin and that Qur’an-burning fruitcake get any press at all.
“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.” – Ayn Rand in “The Nature of Government,†from The Virtue of Selfishness
In which I’m kinda disappointed.
School starts on Monday. I’m registered, I’ve finally started to get financial aid awards, and I have a list of stuff I need to buy at the bookstore. So exciting! And the city buses have bike racks, so I can ride up to the transit center and take a bus to campus. Whee!
All three classes on my schedule show “ASSIGNED” in the date and time column, though. Hmm. Since all three are all taught by the same guy, I decided to email him to find out when to be in class.
He emailed back today and explained that my classes – Linux/Unix, CCNA, and Windows Client – are all online. In fact, they’re not only online, they’re TestOut lab sims.
In other words: I don’t get to go to school. I have to study online. By myself. Which is exactly what I’d wanted to avoid by going to school in the first place!
I bought the CCNA manual when I got laid off and made it through about three chapters before getting bored and abandoning it. The whole point of going back to school (besides wasting time with the hope that the economy will improve) was to gain structure to help me study the material!
Here’s the math: TestOut lab sims cost about $500 each and I’m taking three this quarter. Tuition at CC is about $1200 per quarter and “books” (which, for me, is the client software for the labs) is about $300. Ergo, I could have blown off the school thing altogether and bought the TestOut modules for the same price! I have no idea why I’m even registered at WWCC, frankly… oh, except that I’m also getting an advisor, and some kind of 1-year vocational certificate, I think. So that’s something, I guess. But I really had wanted to go to actual classes.
Oh, well. At least now I have weekly assignments and test dates; that’s more structure than I had before. And I could probably get into events at student prices. Do they even still have student pricing?
Just you watch: I’ll have in-person classes next quarter, when it’s winter and I don’t want to have leave the house, and then all I’ll do is bitch about it. Heh.
In which it’s… well, if not the best story, at least there’s a learning curve. That’s always good, right?
Over the last few months, I’ve invested a non-trivial amount of time in reading up on bicycle maintenance. There are all kinds of informative articles and videos on the Internet, and it’s just a bike, right? I’m smart, I should be able to learn how to take care of a bike, right?
Well, sort of. It turns out that while I was interested enough in doing the research itself, I wasn’t interested enough to actually do any of the things I’d learned, so I caved and took the bike over to Allegro Cyclery where it was given a tune-up and new tires by persons who were not myself.
Tuesday morning I walked over – via a stop at the Starbucks on 1st & Main, which had literally been remodeled overnight and was really disorienting and weird – to pick it up. I gave them eighty bucks, and they gave me my bike! In working condition!
I walked it a block to the pita place and grabbed a falafel for lunch (falafel travels comfortably in the purse, you see). Then I rode it home. And it was awesome. And fast! Yay, I have a BIKE again! For the first time since, what, since I was dating Vita at MIU? So, probably fifteen years.
I ate, I worked for a bit, I made calls to WorkSource and WWCC. Then I went for another ride! Whee! Bicycle! WHEE! I went to the post office. I rode around in circles. I rode around downtown. I timed the trip back from St. Mary’s because I had an appointment there later. I rode through the insane crazy construction zone that is much of 1st street. Three times.
Which was probably a mistake, because when I went to hop back on the bike (to go get my boobs smashed in an expensive machine at St. Mary’s) it had a flat.
So I jumped in the truck and drove ten blocks (that global warming thing? MY FAULT) because I didn’t have time to walk. And the nice lady in Imaging smashed my boobs in an expensive machine for the first time ever (it hurts, by the way), and then I went back to the bike shop to buy a patch kit and some kind of bike-tire-airing-up apparatus.
Since I hadn’t aired up a bike tire in over a decade, I didn’t really have a way to choose between various bike-tire-airing-up apparatuses, so after the awesome guy showed me all the available choices, I just picked the smallest one. Because, as you know, I love tiny electronics, and I figured a tiny tool is close enough, and there’s a compressor at home that weighs seven hundred pounds so what I really need is a portable bike-tire-airing-up apparatus thingy that I can take with me.
And when I got home I aired up the tire, just to see if it really had a hole in it.
It did, damn it.
Today, I took the tire off the bike (which required more time than you’d think, since I had to find tools and figure out how to do it) and got the tube out and stuck it in the sink and found the bubbles and patched the hole. (I think that may have been the very first time in my entire life that I’ve ever patched a bicycle tire all by myself.) Then I put the tire back together and took it out to the garage to air it up.
And then I spent a long damn time finding the right attachment for the compressor, and then an even longer time trying to set the bead on the damned tire before finally giving up for a couple of hours because HOLY COW THIS JUST SHOULDN’T TAKE THIS FREAKING LONG, IT JUST SHOULDN’T. (It was hard because the tire is new and has therefore been folded up in a box until just recently, and because compressors blow a lot of air really fast, and because the attachment I was using was kind of awkward to control, and because I’m not seriously mechanical by nature).
Stupid flat tire. Jeez. I just picked the freaking thing up yesterday. Hell, I probably didn’t even ride it five miles! What the hell, stupid flat tire!
At least it wasn’t the rear tire. Knock on wood.
When I tried again a few hours later, I got the bead to set and the tire filled up beautifully. And it was still light outside, so I’d have time for a ride! Yay! But when I turned off the compressor, I could hear hissing.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, holding the tire up to my ear.
Oh yes it did. The thing was hissing like a snake. “Damn it! Damn it all to HELL!” I yelled, stomping my foot.
No, it wasn’t the patch failing – I’d done that right. It was the valve leaking. I must have broken it somehow, in the course of my learning curve. No bike rides for me today. Argh! This is entirely too tedious for a freakin’ bicycle tire!!!
I’m just going to take the thing back to the bike shop tomorrow and have them replace the tube for me, because I’m not interested in screwing around with it any more. I just want to ride the damn bike over to WWCC and back to see how long it takes!
Oh, well. At least I now have an adorable tiny little tool kit. And I’ve learned how to patch a tire and where the attachment is for the compressor, all stuff I hadn’t known before. So that’s good. Right?
Yes, as a matter of fact I am keeping my bike tools in the box I got from my manicurist that used to contain emery boards. (What. The stuff fits perfectly!) World’s tiniest toolbox! Whoo hoo!
In which I haven’t posted in ten days and need to correct that little oversight.
Since my last post, I have
– gone to the county fair:
– danced at the Stone Hut’s outdoor parking lot fair event thing, which was ended by a torrential downpour and at which I was nearly trampled.
– played at Basel Cellars’ annual grape stomp event.
– attended the Tomato Fare (where I did not sing, because I had laryngitis) and discovered how many lovely heirloom varietals there are:
Continue reading »
In which there are books. In various formats.
I’ll start school in eighteen days (if the financial aid office at WWCC ever awards me any aid, that is) and probably won’t read much that isn’t assigned for the next nine months. That being true, I thought I’d share my current reading-for-pleasure list with you.
“Real” Books
As far as treeware goes, there’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-third Annual Collection that I haul out every once in awhile. I’m not sure if I’ve read it before or not, but I don’t remember the stories so it’s just like reading them for the first time anyway. There’s also Eternal Wisdom, Upadeshamritam Part 2. I have read this before, but it was different water then and I was a different bridge.
Ebooks
The last three items I opened on my Kindle were the October 2010 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction (the double issue! yay! delivered wirelessly while I wasn’t even looking!), Bright Of The Sky (a loss leader Amazon.com suggested to me and which I downloaded because hey, it was free), and Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallmann’s Crusade for Free Software.
The last three ebooks I added to the Kindle were Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life, Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
I have fifteen non-fiction items on the Kindle, all free samples from Amazon, that I have not yet begun to read, and I’m on page three of Cory Doctorow’s Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. I guess I forgot it was on there because I buried the ebook in a folder I haven’t looked into for awhile.
I bought the latest Clarkesworld Magazine a few days ago and am about to crack into that, and I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon on and off for months. It’s hilarious and brilliant, but somehow I never feel compelled to read it. (My favorite Stephenson book was Anathem; I actually finished that in a reasonable amount of time. It took me forever to read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and forget about The Baroque Cycle; I’ll never read those. NOTHING should require that many words to convey!)
Miscellaneous Book Facts
Total number of ebooks (including magazines and today’s NYT) on my Kindle: 79
Total number of ebooks on my iPod (in five different reader apps): 110 (a few of which are duplicated on the Kindle)
Total number of ebooks in Calibre: 304 (about a sixth of which are DRM-locked to devices I no longer have but most can be re-downloaded for the current device)
Total number of “real” books I own: 113 (most of which are cookbooks, and 6 of which are musical scores)
In which I need to whine and complain. (Don’t read this drivel. Seriously. Go read something else. I am such a baby.)
The boys over at Cocky & Rude nagged me into joining their diet competition back in July, and even though I haven’t really been dieting, I have been weighing myself every Wednesday and from that I have some fucked up observations to share.
For the first four weeks, my weight didn’t change (other than a slight and temporary bump during The Curseâ„¢, which is normal). On week 5, I gained a pound (for The Curseâ„¢, natch); but on week 6, I gained another pound.
Then on week 7, I gained SIX POUNDS. And week 8 I gained another 3 pounds, for a grand total of eleven pounds in four weeks.
I quit smoking during week 6 and ate whatever the hell I wanted in any amount I liked for about ten days, but then I went back to eating the way I normally eat, which pretty much keeps me at the same weight under normal circumstances.
I don’t think I’ve gained much fat because I am retaining so much water that my inner ankles are smooth; there’s no bone protruding where you’d expect to see an ankle bone.
This extreme water retention thing happened to me once before about three years ago and it lasted a cycle or two, if I recall correctly… I wasn’t weighing regularly so I don’t know exactly when it ended, but I remember being ankleless and reading up on edema and water retention. Home care is exercise, less sodium, and, counterintuitively, drinking more water.
Anyway, since this has happened before it’s probably not related to quitting smoking, and I have hope that next cycle I’ll drop all this hideous water OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE.
I’m noticing some other oddities too, in terms of moodiness and fatigue, that could be related to quitting – such symptoms are listed in all the smoking cessation articles – but feel more hormonal to me.
So: is this some kind of event I’m getting to enjoy merely because I’m a girl and This Sort Of Shit Just Happens Occasionally, or is it related to quitting smoking?
EITHER WAY, IT SUCKS! I’m fat and mopey and I have no ankles! Shut up looking at me!
In which I talk about really old stuff.
The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.
But.
When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.
Flash back a couple of years:
The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.
Flash forward five years:
After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.
None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.
What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.
Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.
Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.
There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.
There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.
That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.
No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.
I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.
The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.
Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.
The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.
I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.
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4 random books from my Library!
