Category Archives: Life

A hell of a drug…

Posted on by

This past weekend was the first time I’d been home during the autumn in probably 20 years. I’d be lying to you if I tried to play it off as if driving down old familiar roads with the leaves changing, even on a rain swept day, didn’t find the nostalgia hitting hard. It was mostly memories of fall long ago – a time and place so different from today that it almost feels like something from a fever dream. 

The combination of the smells and colors of fall bought on instant flashes of core memory… the lion’s share of which featured long trips on the band bus and friends I thought of then as closer than family. The memories were so thick I could damn near touch them. 

Of course, it’s not this time of year for me if any trip down memory lane doesn’t come along with a touch of melancholy. I couldn’t resist dipping my toe into thoughts of how much time has changed it all – the priorities, the people, and how important they are beyond treasured in memory. Some, fortunately, have hung in there for the long haul. That’s fortunate. Who else would sit around over lunch and listen to the same old stories about the olden days?

The weekend was anything but restful. It feels distinctly like I skipped the part of the week where I usually put my feet up and recover… like somehow we bleed directly from Thursday into Monday without any intervening time. I don’t regret it for a moment, but I’ll be high key happy to get through the next four days and then have a proper rest.

I’m glad to be back into the routine… but damned if the draw of falling back into decades old habits wasn’t washing over me like some siren’s song. Even now I can feel that tide ebbing away, but in the moment it absolutely felt like I could have stepped back into a life I haven’t lived in a quarter of a century without so much as a stutter step. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. 

On deciding whether or not to scratch an itch…

Posted on by

I’m inching closer to the idea of packing a bag and taking a few days away. I haven’t been on a proper vacation in years and there’s part of me that feels like I could be well served by having a stretch of time where I don’t have to be the head cook and bottle washer of all household operations. A few days with a guide and a driver and needing to make very few decisions feels kind of ideal. 

I’ve gone so far as narrowing down dates and destinations, pricing out travel options, and looking at a host of optional day trips and activities. The thing I haven’t done – and the one bit that could readily derail any kind of quality planning – is sorted out what I’ll do with a dog, two cats, and a tortoise while I’m traipsing around interesting new locales. I struggle a bit leaving them for what amounts to a glorified long weekend around the Christmas season… and even then, Jorah is along for the ride with me. 

The fact is, Jorah will be six years old in October and I haven’t spent a night away from him. Given his somewhat neurotic tendencies, I don’t have a real warm fuzzy about how well he’d react to being turned over to a kennel for a week. There’s always the option of hiring a live in sitter for the duration of the trip… an option that triggers a lot of feelings of grave distrust of having unknown people in my personal space unaccompanied. Add in my never resolved guilt that one of the last times I went away I came home just in time to find Hershel sick and dying and race him hopelessly to the emergency vet. It’s not a recipe for making animal care decisions especially easy.

I know there are a lot of my own issues rolled up there. Animals are supposedly very adaptable – likely more so than I am myself. I should probably just make the reservations and force the issue, but I can’t quite bring myself to pull that particular trigger.

The day that got away…

Posted on by

Some days get away from you unexpectedly. Sometimes you get a sense right from the opening bell that the day is going to be a foot race. Today wasn’t one of those. It slipped away in dribs and drabs, one Teams message or email at a time, until there was nothing left but to call it done.

I don’t necessarily mind days like that. It’s better than being bored to tears… but I’ll admit the writing sufferers a bit when it happens. In fact it was just 15 minutes before normal post time when I realized I didn’t have a thing feed up for Monday evening. A sinking feeling, for sure, but the muses at least let me fiddle around with this minor idea a bit before it was due.

We’re headed into a long holiday weekend – four days and a little extra for me. If I get luck, maybe the next three days will slip by with as little trouble. Then again experience tells me I have no business expecting things to go smoothly, but if it does, it would be an awfully pleasant surprise.

In any case, I rattle this out as fast as my little thumbs would carry me and then promptly forgot to hit “publish,” so I guess we all know now exactly how the week is going to go. Ah, situation normal.

On hard decisions and heartbreak…

Posted on by

Back in late June, Ivy was the cat who picked me while I visited the local cat rescue’s open house event. While I made the rounds, she followed me from one end of the room to the other and promptly jumped on my lap the moment I sat down. I couldn’t help but be charmed by her endless purring and loving personality. I submitted an adoption application thinking that surely, my sweet, relaxed resident cats would quickly adapt to a charming newcomer.

Following standard “slow introduction” procedures, the first week went well. They progressed rapidly from sniffing at a closed door, to eating on either side of the door, to observing each other through a baby gate, and eventually watching one another with the door open. Past that, things got awkward. 

As soon as Ivy had leeway to explore the house, Anya and Cordy retreated under the bed. Ok, back up to the prior stage of introduction and try again in a few days. This was when we entered the wash, rinse, and repeat phase of attempted introductions – with Ivy desperate to meet her new housemates and them hissing and spitting any time she got close. Rather than improving with exposure, Anya particularly became increasingly resistant and, in some cases, violent no matter how hard Ivy worked to project “friendly” body language. 

For the better part of two weeks, I ran the household in two shifts – With Anya and Cordy tucked in my bedroom from 5 AM to 5 PM and Ivy returned to her “safe room” from 5 PM – 5 AM. It was my misguided hope that as their scents and smells combined in the house, paraphs they’d desensitize to one another. 

Cat Reddit is filled with internet experts that will say six weeks was not nearly enough time to settle things – that it can take months or years for integrate adult cats. If anything, I feel like there’s a lot of talk in the rescue community decrying that adult cats are so often left in shelters and rescues month after month while kittens and youngsters fly out the doors. I always assumed that was a simple function of the “cuteness factor,” but I now have a sneaking suspicion that adult cats are so often overlooked, in part, because introducing adult cats and convincing them to live together can be a nightmare – or at least a significant unplanned hardship that the average person isn’t equipped to deal with. 

Having had many dogs and cats over the years, I consider myself reasonably animal savvy, but I was absolutely unprepared to continue on for month after month with Cordelia and Anya angry and chased out of their home while Ivy was increasingly confused by why she was being cast back into isolation every night. By the end, I suspect it had become a not particularly happy way of life for any of us. Capped off with three scuffles across Friday evening and Saturday morning when trying to re-initiate brief introductions again. 

To their credit, the rescue was incredibly understanding when I reached out to say I needed to bring Ivy back to them. I’d been keeping them up to date with the struggles, so maybe it wasn’t much of a surprise. I suspect the whole experience may have been more traumatizing to me than to Ivy. I opened her carrier at the rescue and she walked out without a moment’s hesitation, head butted the nearest cat, and made herself at home immediately. She was more comfortable and welcome in that room with 10 or 12 other cats in 30 seconds than Anya and Cordy had made her feel in six weeks.

I’ll never think of this period as one of my best moments. I’ll always wonder if there was something more that I could have tried or if hanging on for another week could have made any difference. I’ll probably never get away from thinking that sheer willpower is enough to drag things over the line, but in this case, seeing how Ivy reacted back in the rescue on Saturday and then how relaxed Anya and Cordy were on Sunday is probably the real sign that this particular hard decision was the right one. 

I wish doing the right thing didn’t so often involve being absolutely heartbroken. I really do miss that sweet calico girl.

Three is enough…

Posted on by

By now, I suppose everyone who’s interest already knows that I added a 3rd cat to the list of critters living here on the homestead. Ivy is a sweet, approximately one year old calico female who arrived here by way of the Chesapeake Feline Association, who are effectively neighbors to me here on the bank of the Elk River. They’re a small team doing good work and I was happy to be able to be a small part of it. 

As I’m writing this, Ivy has been home with us for about three and a half days now. She’s briefly met Jorah and Anya at the door to her “safe room,” but hasn’t shown much (if any) interest in checking out the rest of the house yet and seems content to hang out in the guest bathroom for the time being. I’m doing my best to remember that time really isn’t a factor here and it takes as long as it takes to get everyone comfortable with this new arrangement.

Aside from a bit more outlay for food and the inevitable increase in vet bills, tending to three cats instead of two doesn’t feel like it’s adding too much workload at this point. I expect it will become even easier once we get everyone integrated and don’t have to maintain separate feeding, watering, and litter operations. I’m not going to speculate on how long that may take.

I’ve often joked that I’ve reached carrying capacity in the past. Now with five furry and scaled mouths to feed, I really mean it. Five is the absolute upper limit… unless I come into a lot of money and can hire staff, of course. Then all bets are off.

In any case, I’m pleased as punch to have a new member of the family settling in… but I’ll be well and truly thrilled when we get past the awkward introductory stage and can all start living together. 

One thirty down and I have some thoughts…

Posted on by

It’s been just about a year since I made the conscious decision to get my weight down towards something that wouldn’t trigger such a serious lecture every time I walked into a doctor’s office. Realizing that I was, in fact, both destructible and well past the demographic definition of middle-age gave me a level of motivation I’d never had before. Score one for the motivating power of fear and self-preservation. 

In any case, dropping 130 pounds over the last year hasn’t exactly been an adventure. I’m agitated every day about the foods – and lifestyle – I had to give up in order to achieve what would be easy to assume was purely a vanity exercise. I won’t pretend I don’t have my vanities, but none of them have ever been tied to my appearance, which is probably for the best.

I’m sure when I wander back to my doctor for my next scheduled checkup, he’ll make all the appropriate approving noises. My most recent bloodwork came back with significantly marked improvements over its historic baseline. Even if we haven’t gotten to the root causes of what was causing my heart to ramp up to a sprint of its own accord, it’s hard to argue against my innards being healthier than they were a year ago. 

What no one mentioned as they encouraged me through this process, though, was all the minor annoyances that would accompany this process. I just did my second cull of the clothes hanging in my closet and came to the unhappy realization that I only have eight shirts and two pair of pants that fit now. The rest – some of my favorite shirts mind you – are now comically oversized on my new frame. 

I’m going to have to take some time during this little Independence Week vacation for clothes shopping. I spent time doing that already this spring. This means I’ve spent more time shopping for clothes in the last three months than I have in the last three years. In fact, it will probably account for more time than I’ve spent shopping in the last decade.

I used to know the brands I liked and the appropriate sizes. It was easy enough finding them online and reordering as needed. Now, every damned shirt is a roll of the dice. It’s an enormous pain in the ass and feels a little bit like adding insult to injury. Sure, I’ll do it because wandering around naked is frowned upon by western civilization (and winter is coming), but there’s no power in heaven or earth than can make me enjoy the process. 

A roll of the dice…

Posted on by

You’d think that after nine days off, I’d have been rested, relaxed, and at least nominally prepared to go back to work. All those things might have been true on Sunday night, but on Monday morning exactly none of them are true. Wading in to the week deep backlog of email pretty much put an end to any opportunity for good feeling that could have bled over into the work week. Funny how that works.

One of the skills I’ve mostly mastered over the years is leaving the “work stuff” safely at work. I’ve been doing it so long now that I can even do it when the work stuff resides, for more days than not, in my home office. Once the lid on the laptop closes at the end of the day, it might as well cease to exist. It’s honestly a helpful mental trick if you can manage it. 

Unfortunately, because I like getting paid and would absolutely suck at living under a bridge or in a refrigerator box, eventually I have to start paying attention again – or at least I do for the next 11 years or so. Even so, it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep up the appearance that everything is a Big Serious Issue just because someone at echelons higher than reality says it is. 

Look, I get it that most everyone wants to believe whatever they spend their time doing is the changing the world or saving the universe. It’s comforting, but objectively it’s almost never the case.  On an average day, the average person working themselves into a lather doesn’t do much besides raise their own blood pressure.

In any case, I’m back at work for the next few weeks… and keeping my mouth from calling out every bit of fuckery I see seems like it’s going to be the project of the summer. How well that will work really is a roll of the dice at this point. 

On my distinct lack of give-a-shit…

Posted on by

There are a million things going on in the world, and if I’m brutally honest with you (and with myself), there’s not a single one of them I feel interested enough in to write about today. Sure, my privilege is showing or whatever, but I just don’t have it in me at the moment to be morally outraged, vaguely interested, heartbroken, or whatever appropriate response is dictated by the events of the day. 

All I really want to do – and therefore what I will spend my evening doing – is sitting here comfortably with a book. Jorah will inevitable be napping next to me. One of the cats (Anya for sure) will be curled up between my knees. Monday is bad enough on its own without trying to dwell too much on all the ills of the world. 

This is a thought I keep coming back to. I know it’s made an appearance here more than once. There are probably lots of valid questions – How engaged should we be in what’s happening outside our bubble? What do I owe the world if I’m keeping shit together inside my own fence line? Should I even be bothered by what’s happening out there beyond my immediate span of control? 

The last year has, somewhat of necessity, been focused internally – on what I’ve needed to do in an attempt to follow doctor’s orders and the various episodes of fuckery that resulted from that. While it hasn’t been a full-on shitstorm, it has been the better part of a year of the number of things I’ve had the bandwidth to care about being reduced pretty dramatically. Maybe that was self-preservation, but the downstream consequence seems to be that my naturally low give-a-shit level is almost nonexistent these days. Believe me when I tell you that any time you think you see me giving a shit (and it doesn’t directly involve animal welfare or mocking the feckless or stupid among us) I’m 100% faking it… and probably doing a piss poor job of that in the moment. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever adjust this attitude or if I even want to. Like so much else, that is apparently yet to be determined.

Revising the plan…

Posted on by

More than a decade ago I finally got around to asking a lawyer to officially draw up a will and do some end of life planning. Having something on file in the event of “what if” felt like the prudent thing to do in my 30s.  Honestly, I packaged it off to the county courthouse and then pretty much didn’t think of it at all for almost 11 years. 

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years. More specifically, bouncing around between hospitals and specialists since last summer has absolutely focused my mind a bit about what I’d want to happen should things go sideways in a hurry. No one seems to think I’m on the threshold of keeling over, but I am on the precipice of falling over into the back half of my 40s. Dusting things off and giving it all an update felt, once again, like the prudent course of action.

I don’t think anyone ever really enjoys peering through the glass at their own mortality. Going through the bits and bobs certainly wasn’t a laugh riot, but I feel better for having started the process. There is, if nothing else, some small comfort in having the ability to have your intentions known even when you can no longer speak for yourself.

I assume it’ll take a little bit of time for the legal eagles to get things caught up, but overall I feel like I’ve done a good thing. If nothing else, may it was a good way to start drawing a line under my year of medical fuckery and getting on with things. 

Failure and recovery…

Posted on by

I was raised in the age of the personal computer. Not long after the first Apple Macintosh ended up in my elementary school’s “computer lab,” one landed on our desk at home. Still, though, I don’t necessarily consider myself a “digital native.” For the most part, my computers have always simply been productivity tools that more or less live on my desk. I don’t generally ask them to do anything extraordinary or heroic – a bit of word processing, web browsing, and video streaming. 

I also have a bit of a habit of keeping my computers just a bit too long. Unlike my phone, as long as the computer is puttering along, I’m mostly satisfied to let it keep going even at a slowed pace. In 30+ years of computer ownership, that’s always been good enough.

Good enough always is right up to the point where it isn’t… which is apparently the point I reached with my 10-year-old iMac last Thursday afternoon. Sometime between when I signed out of work for the day at 4:00 and when I sat down and tried to stream an episode of Game of Thrones while I had dinner at 5:00 (don’t judge me), I suffered what I’ve taken to calling a “catastrophic hard drive failure.” 

If you haven’t lost a hard drive unexpectedly, I don’t recommend it. I’ve spent the last three days slowly putting my electronic life back together. Needing to unexpectedly buy a new computer, of course, just adds insult to injury.

For the last five or six years, I’ve been paying a nominal monthly fee to have my computer backed up “in the cloud.” That has honestly been the saving grace of this experience once I remembered that I actually hadn’t lost decades of photos, writing, finances, and every other kind of file and record you can imagine. Once I got past the initial terror at the possibility of losing everything, getting it all back was just a matter of following all the steps – and downloading a lot of software. 

I’m not absolutely thrilled with my new 24-inch iMac. Stepping down from the 27-inch model feels, in some ways, like a downgrade. It’s a fine machine and I still like the all-in-one form factor, but I’m really missing the extra screen real estate. I won’t rule out needing to add a second monitor at some point to compensate for that. For now, I’m trying to be satisfied with having brough things back to life in fairly short order and without too much trouble. 

For my next trick, I’ll be ordering a new external hard drive so I can start keeping an onsite back up of everything. For most situations that should be more convenient and really cut down the amount of time it takes to recover… but you can bet I’ll keep paying that monthly fee for online backup. It proved to be some of the best money I’ve ever spent on a subscription.