Category: Thoughts

Just been reflecting on some recent victories. Small, personal things. They took a long time, years in some cases, but victories all the same. I don’t get a lot of validation for the way I try to do things, and maybe I don’t need much. But it sure feels good when I rightfully earn it and get it.

Everyone has it the wrong way round. Love before career. Every time. Our hearts don’t break when we leave a job. Our hearts break if we leave our life partner. You’ll never find ME coming home late from work or doing overtime. I care too much about putting the important people in my personal life first. I don’t really care much for expensive holidays to wherever. That’s just a bonus. Maybe I take extra care of my relationship with my fiance because I don’t want to end up bitter like the many other women who have got divorced. They end up hating men after divorcing. Slap me if I ever become like a bitter divorced woman.

My former neighbors had a daughter named Jordan. They time ago now, Tonya moved to Casper and Sean stayed nearby since her daughter and mother live nearby. Before they separated I remember meeting Jordan on a number of occasions, and her fiance Chris briefly before he killed himself in front of her by hanging himself from a tree on the anniversary of his father’s own suicide.

I remember Tanya telling me how hard Jordan struggled with it afterwards and though Tanya seemed impatient when she would have a breakdown , I understood the challenges facing a memory like that posed daily.
It’s my first day back from my roadtrip and I get a text message from Tanya saying Jordan had died in an auto accident. When I let my husband know as he got back from his walk he wanted to offer some sort of support to Sean but panicked as he saw the last text message sent was a Happy Father’s Day, so he called instead. I don’t think either of us realized how recently it happened because Sean was still rough from crying cried too after the conversation ended. She was four years younger than me and though she may not have known me well, I had heard all sorts of stories from her childhood going to the renaissance Faire every year to some of her deepest tragedies and in that I had come to know her in a sense.

My family held a reunion, the first in five years at Dutch John Resort in Utah. I was told nearly all the cabins were rented out by family members from all the different branches. My cousin planed this one and for the first time that I know of picked the theme of a luau for the big party night. It was a six hour drive to get there from where I am, the first round we accidentally took a ultra backroads way trying to avoid the mudslides on I70. When we got there we were immediately greeted by a few of my cousins, aunt and uncle whom had arrived the previous day and then invited out rafting while mom kept an eye on my kid while she ran around with her baby cousins who had all instantly become best buddies.
When we finally got back to camp to settle in, we set up a tent next to mom’s in the cabin yard. We were the only ones to bring tents, everyone else either rented a cabin or had an rv. The bulk of the family had arrived by nightfall so I had to make the rounds to greet the ones I knew, there were others from Vegas and New Mexico I was much less familiar with that took more time for me to get conversational with.
The next day was luau and the cornhole tournament in the back of my grandma’s luxury cabin she was sharing with her sister . A large sign spelled out Aloha in the back and one of my cousins husband’s unveiled a project he had been working on, a massive foldout of our family tree that he then took Polaroids of all of us for its completion.
While it was a joy having everyone in this space having fun regardless of their beliefs there was a sadness knowing it would be the last time seeing some as age and health struggles tend to sneak up. I did my best to do my own documentation through pictures that I’ll send out later with Shutterfly.
My husband was even pleasantly suprised having expected a less hospitable environment with the political climate as it seems. He helped my aunt who is wheelchair bound by building up her shower chair and made his services readily available when someone needed help. I appreciated that.

Both nights after the sun went down the sky gave me a lightening show with all the light but none of the bite of thunder. Then around 12:30 coyotes would wander by, yipping on the fringes of camp. I may not have slept well but the experience was unique.

I asked you nicely to stop hounding me about how much time I spend with my business documents, but this time you’ve gone too far. I simply cannot believe you threw my Brother HL-L6200DW series laser printer into our swimming pool. Do you realize what you’ve done? How am I supposed to generate presentation-quality business documents on a reliable printer at an industry-best cost per page when my high-performance printer with a 520-sheet capacity paper tray that holds more than a ream of paper is sitting at the bottom of our pool?

I’ll admit that in recent months I’ve been spending more and more time with my business documents, going over the charts and graphs and tables for hours on end, but it was all necessary to my business. I run a business, Lorraine. I’m a businessman. I travel on business frequently and stay at the Ramada Inn. And what’s at the core of my success in business? What drives my bottom line and puts food on our table and buys us vacations to Fort Lauderdale every three years?

That’s right, my professionally printed high quality business documents. Documents that I will now have to go to Kinko’s to print. Do you realize that they charge nearly a quarter a page for high quality, presentation-ready documents? My Brother HL-L6200DW series laser printer has a cost per page that makes Kinko’s look like highway robbery. I love you but you have GOT to get a grip and let me continue to spend the time I need on my business documents!

Last night I opened up the windows to give the air conditioning a break and my ears were met with a horrible bleating sound, like a man vomiting or having a mental episode. The sound goes on, 30 minutes plus until I close the window, bit not before recording the sound because I can’t see anything out there and am unwilling to go outside and see if potential violence awaits me.

My husband leaves for work in the early hours of the morning. He later text messages me saying he saw goat man was across the street this morning twitching like crazy carrying on his his mangled noises.

At my friends open house that was being held on my birthday. Advertisements promised music, drinks and some fine art in the presence of those who made it at a beautiful little tattoo parlor downtown.

Instead I went to my dads for dinner since he made the effort to call.
It didn’t exactly work out well for me though.He invited a few other people, his friend that used to rent a room from him and his girlfriend and her three kids, the youngest of which had a persistent cough that his mother brushed off as allergies took a keen interest in my child coughing directly in her face as he showed her his current gaming obsession involving a tiny chibi SlenderMan.

We stayed long enough to enjoy dinner of roasted meats. My dad’s wife regifted me a moon nightlight I gave her a year ago along with a floating cube picture frame, her son also suprised me with a nice coffee cup that says Catfineited, fueled by cats and coffee. I in turn had gifted my dad a few souvenirs from Spokane since his birthday was a few days previous mine.

My kid started panicking though when flies started buzzing around the living room from the open doors,Bad enough that I thought it time to make our way home. My dad made the comment that I was never like that and I had to refrain from saying he wouldn’t know because he wasn’t around then and I in fact remember a few of my unreasonable tantrums from back in the day.

Within a day my kid was throwing up with a fever of 102. I messaged my dad to see if anyone else got sick but didn’t get a response or even concern about his grand child. Two days if vomit, four days of fever. And I’m still dealing with sleepless nights 12 days later as her sleep schedule had truly gotten knocked out of whack.

I’m a bit regretful I didn’t choose the art show as it felt like a gift that it was even held on my birthday at all but we also need to save money and I wouldn’t have liked the feeling of ditching a family dinner either. However if I had known with certainty what would happen after… I would have opted to keep my baby safe. More to brood on before school starts up.

When will it finally
start
or
end?

I tried to clean it with a mixture of vinegar and baking soda. I let the mixture react, did an initial wipe, and then hit the grout lines with a drill-attached scrub brush. It worked alright but the remnants of baking soda splashed on everything—the shower, the toilet, the walls. Throughout the next week or so I got to wipe splotches of baking soda off of the fixtures. Then I consulted the Google for a solution that would allow me to complete the job with much less effort.

I picked it up at Home Depot. It’s a highly acid solution that brightens the grout on contact. I scrub it in with a brush and then wipe it up with rubber gloves to protect my skin from chemical burns. Once the bottle is empty I should probably be careful about where I rinse it out; the pipes in this house are old.

If I was disposing of this bottle at work I wouldn’t be allowed to just throw it away. The EPA and DEQ have special waste handling requirements for all production facilities. So does DOT if you need to drive your waste offsite. I get it. I took DOT classes to become certified to authorize shipments of hazardous materials.

The code addresses every type of pollutant imaginable. If I were to guess, I’d say that the active ingredient in this grout chemical is a marine pollutant with some degree of reactivity with other stuff. But I’m a homeowner and exempt from federal and state disposal requirements; I could toss the open bottle into a nearby lake and that wouldn’t be illegal.

There are measurable amounts of micro-plastics in rainwater. Plastic rain. And outside it’s hot. Five standard deviations of the expected value hot. A one-in-5,000 year event hot. Buckling, cracking, melting infrastructure hot. The high pressure will be around for awhile; I guess that’s what happens when we break the jet stream.

The ocean conveyor wants to stop. I’m sure the fire in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t help with that. Temperature gradients are kind of causal. The country is controlled by insane people who think they need large, beautifully-preserved piles of money more than they need their grandchildren to not boil to death in the ocean. Priorities.

Greed.

I call her up after a hot day and tell her that it’s hard to escape the heat but it’s even harder to escape my feelings about the climate emergency that none of us can really do anything about. Says tells me to be calm and save my worries for something else. We recycle and vote and preserve and reduce the impact where we can. Otherwise it’s out of our hands.

I tell her I’m not fearful. I feel guilty. Humans are the locusts who invade and destroy the habitat. Superpredators. I’m sad for the animals.

She, a vet nurse, says “Don’t be sad for the animals. The animals aren’t sad for themselves. This is all they know. The planet will survive. The humans won’t. I’m okay with that.”

I’m okay with that. <3