Now We Burn It All Down

Last week was... fraught. Secondborn started school. Our Internet went out on Thursday. Various other issues came up, some work, some personal. Some weeks are just one damned thing after another, and that was one of them.

This week we'll be back to having one kid left in the house. She's doing classes and assignments, some synchronous and some not, online -- which seems to be working better than whatever trainwreck her former school was inflicting. So we're cautiously optimistic, there. Firstborn is back at college, ensconced in his dorm room, and given firm instructions to quit pushing people away. He could have friends, he's just chosen not to, and we're doing our best to steer him back to making connections with people or at least be open to them. A lot of that is just him (he gets it from me, sort of) but I feel like Covid isolation also robbed him of some critical socialization experience. 

Anyway, I've taken some time off from work and I'm generally trying to have a normal sleep schedule and not be crazy, but I swear to all the gods, known and forgotten, that the world is trying me right now. 

A Theoretical Murder

Okay, storytime: 

So we're on a cruise a few years back. It's over Christmas, so the ship is absolutely jam-packed with people -- apparently this is the favorite/worst time to take a cruise. But my in-laws are paying, so we go anyway. Towards the end of the trip, we manage to get tickets to the onboard magic show. 

Now, the magician and his assistant are really good, and I remain jealous of his leather trenchcoat to this day. We're all sitting in a row, but owing to the way we came in it's kind of haphazard... with the result that I'm kind of seated at one end of our group, with my niece on one side of me and Firstborn sitting next to her. 

Anyway, the magician does one of the classic tricks: puts his assistant in a wooden box, sticks a few swords through it, and then saws it in half and swings the two halves apart. At which point my niece, who's about ten years old at this point, leans over to me and stage-whispers: "He killed her!"

And by the dark and forgotten gods, the only way I could think to reassure her was to whisper back, "No he didn't. Not enough blood." 

Grappling with Parenthood

Things I have learned from grappling with Secondborn in the kitchen. (It was supposed to be a hug, but no: he's a teenager. Apparently a hug is an invitation to a Sumo-style contest. Kids these days, amirite?)

1. Do not grapple with your son on a tile floor when he's barefoot and you're wearing fuzzy slippers. The claws on those slippers are purely ornamental and do not help you grip the floor as he's sliding you down the hallway.
2. I am apparently still just barely enough taller than he is to lift him off the ground, thus denying him his advantage in traction.
3. He is tall enough to try to slip out of this.
4. Getting the cabinet behind one foot helps, but is not sufficient by itself. 
5. Secondborn has no training in judo, jujitsu, or wrestling, so it is possible to get him into a controlled throw and set him carefully on the ground. 
6. I'm too old for this shit.
   

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(Fell asleep with voice to text on...)

Second Day of School

School started for the boys yesterday. 

I'm sorry, let me back up a bit on that: here in the unrelenting hellscape that is the year 2020, school has started for the boys. Donald Trump is still in office, the national (and for that matter local) Republican party is essentially indistinguishable from actual, no-shit Nazis, and the COVID-19 pandemic remains terrifyingly rampant in no small part due the White House's deliberate sabotage of all efforts to contain it. The pandemic has so far claimed a probable 200,000 lives -- and while it hasn't been well or thoroughly reported, it appears to cause long-term or even permanent disabilities in a significant number of cases -- and meanwhile probably a good 27% of the country thinks it's either No Big Deal or an outright hoax.

And in the midst of all this, school has started.

In a striking fit of good sense, I elected to take vacation for the first three days -- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday -- and to work from home on Monday. This is because Beautiful Wife starts her new semester of teaching on Monday and is just finishing up the grading on her second summer class; I have to be the one to see to it that the boys get into the rhythm of their semester and that they know what they're supposed to be doing and how to do it. 

Apparently I have been amazingly, apocalyptically stressed out about this. I honestly hadn't noticed until yesterday. 

So yesterday morning I woke everybody up and made sure they ate breakfast and took their meds. Then I settled in to get Secondborn into his classroom and... couldn't. For about an hour. We were following the directions, but the page that was supposed to give us the code for his Google Classroom simply wasn't there -- and without access to the classroom, we didn't have the links to get to anything else. 

Fortunately, it was abundantly clear that we weren't the only ones; and fortunately, emailing Secondborn's teacher did eventually yield the code. After that, I was pretty well able to lie back and let him get on with it under other people's direction. (I checked in on Firstborn, but he had the codes he needed and apparently got started on his day with a bare minimum of muss and/or fuss. Things might still have gone wrong and there might still be some things he missed, but it didn't sound like it.) So once I was fairly sure the boys were on their way, I went back and laid down on the bed and slept for about three hours...

...And that was what finally did me in. When I got back up -- because my cell phone kept ringing, thank you so much -- I could barely move. I'd started a load of dishes earlier; now I opened the dishwasher and just stared at them for about half an hour. So... yeah. I'm scheduling a lot of Not Answering My Phone for today and tomorrow, and I'm only glancing at my email to make that nothing has actually caught fire at either work or school. 

The house needs cleaning -- the house seriously needs cleaning -- but I have got to take a moment and get myself back together before I attempt to do anything about that. I was planning to do a lot of reading and maybe even some writing, and depending on how today goes I might even manage that. And somewhere in there, a hot bath is definitely in order. 

And that, as they say, is the news from Lake Woebegone. Or the Castle d'Mock. Whichever.

"Just In Case"

Well, it's here again. Happens every month. It's just an email to notify me that the Online Account Statement is ready. Which means it's time to pay for the service for all the pagers that this company supplies to us.


Yes, you read that right: "pagers".

Pagers.


Do you know how many pagers we have active right now?

None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even one.

Haven't used 'em in years.


And yet, every month, I get an email explaining that my bill statement is now available for online viewing. There's a link for it and everything.

For the pagers. Of which we have none.


It's a working link. I mean, it takes me to a webpage, and there's a login and everything.

Of course, we don't have an account anymore, so I can't log in. I can't even reset my password, because the login page doesn't recognize my email address.


That would be the same email address at which, every month, I get an email explaining that my bill statement is now available for online viewing.

For the pagers. Of which we have none.


I could, of course, have myself removed from their Electronic Invoicing Program. All I have to do is log into Account Manager.

Account Manager: that thing for which I have no credentials. That thing that doesn't recognize my email address. The same email address it keeps sending alerts to.

For our bills for our pagers, of which we have none.

I have called the company.

They tell me they cannot remove me from the mailing list, because I'm not in their system. I don't have an account, you see. We haven't had an account with them in years.

They can't even find my email. The one which receives the notices from them.


And yet, every month...

Well.

You know.

Pagers.


Seventeen years ago, when I switched from being the Helpdesk to doing something else, I asked if I should get myself taken off the account.

My former boss told me not to. She wanted me to be able to get into the account, just in case.


And in the seventeen years since then, I have never once needed to log into that account.

But every month, I receive a notice that our billing statement is ready.

For an account that we don't have.

Using credentials that no longer exist.

For the pagers.

...Just in case.

Still trying to find a rhythm

First up: No new scenes for Dark Armor today, no new scenes for Into The Black tomorrow. It's just not going to happen.

So we're... trying to keep everything going, but it's hard. Beautiful Wife and I are both still employed, at least, but that's hard too in its own way. (Though admittedly, a lot less hard than not being employed would be.) The boys are doing their schooling at home, which makes it hard for Beautiful Wife to get her work done -- Firstborn has pretty well organized himself and is getting his work done independently, but Secondborn still needs to be prodded and monitored. I'm not sure what I can do to help with that; I'm still going into work, but having me work from home (even on the limited basis that I'd be allowed to do so) really just makes our house more crowded, which hurts more than it helps. And, of course, it's hard to stay focused what with the sense of impending doom hanging over everything and the federal (and state, to a somewhat lesser extent) government's absolute clusterfuck of botched responses and counterproductive messaging. Even my own workplace (municipal government) which I normally think of as fairly sensible and proactive seems to be making financial and economic decisions when it needs to be making medical and humanitarian decisions instead. And trying to be on a regular schedule at work is all sort of detached and surreal; I would have missed a meeting yesterday if somebody hadn't skyped me a "You're late, are you coming?" reminder... either because I'd lost track of the fact that it was Wednesday, or I'd lost track of the fact that we have this meeting every Wednesday, or maybe just because I'd lost track of the fact that I'm me and therefore supposed to attend.

We're doing what we can to stay sane. I'm running the Firstborn-and-friends DnD game on Saturdays and a Saltmarsh campaign for some of my friends on Tuesdays, and playing in a Curse of Strahd campaign on Saturday nights and (starting tonight) (I hope) an old-school Vampire: The Masquerade campaign. This is good for my emotional health, but it's not helping me be productive on my writing projects since I'm putting those energies into creating new characters and getting a feel for them instead. Beautiful Wife is experimenting with online movie nights and just talking on the phone a lot. But all that requires new arrangements, and a different rhythm for our weeknights.

We're doing all right, I think. I'm sure we're doing a lot better than a lot of people, and I feel a little self-conscious about pointing out that despite that, it still sucks. But I'm going to bring dinner home with me tonight (and I cooked dinner for everyone the last two nights - yay me!) so that Beautiful Wife doesn't have to worry about that; and I'm going to try to put away some laundry; and then I'm going to try to play Vampire: The Masquerade.

We do what we can.

How are the rest of you holding up, gentle readers?

We put the cat down

We took the cat to the vet this morning and saw him off. Firstborn is home sick (probably Strep - will we ever be rid of this wretched disease?) so it was everybody except Secondborn. It's probably for the better that he was at school.

It was definitely time. The cat was essentially immobile, so much so that the vet didn't bother giving him a sedative to prepare him.

Definitely time, but it sucks.

The cat is dying

When Beautiful Wife and I first got married, each of us had two cats. Mine were Wayward and Astrophe, while hers were Syn and Claire. We'd pictured merging the two households as a sort of fuzzy Brady Bunch kind of thing, but in the event they didn't blend well. Claire and Wayward kept scrapping for dominance, and various cats were spraying all over the apartment trying to mark territory, and... it just didn't quite work out.

So Wayward went to live with my parents, in a life of luxurious indulgence that I can only admire. The other three stayed with us. Astrophe, apparently, was sufficiently unthreatening that he could bond with the other two.

Then we had children, and I can barely describe the looks of betrayal that the cats gave us as they aged. Cats and toddlers are natural enemies, as cats are very particular about how they get touched, and toddlers will touch everything and have no sense of restraint. But we mostly kept them separated, and everyone was mostly all right.

And, of course, we all got older -- though when the toddlers do that, it's called "growing up". So, y'know, they grew up. The rest of us, cats included, just got older.

Eventually, for health reasons, we put Syn down. A few years later, we did the same for Claire. Neither was easy. Shortly after Claire left us, my parents did the same for Wayward.

And somewhere in the past two weeks, I've realized that we're looking at the same thing for Astrophe. On one level, it's almost overdue; he was looking skinny and miserable two years ago, but we altered his diet to something much more gravy-intensive and got him onto a semi-regular dose of miralax, and for a fairly long while he was doing a lot better. But over the last two weeks or so, well...

He's amazingly skinny. His bones are all very prominent. He keeps wandering into the kitchen and looking at us, but no matter what we give him he eats very little of it. He walks slowly, almost (but not quite) limping. One day last week, he managed to poop and throw up over a huge portion of the house, basically tracing a path from Firstborn's room back to his litter box. It took me a solid half an hour to clean it all up. And as of today, he keeps settling on this one mat beside the litter box -- way closer to his own waste than a healthy cat should be willing to settle. He doesn't seem to be in pain, he's just... increasingly, relentlessly weakening. It's been very sudden. And so far, our every effort to bring him back from this has failed.

He's still a sweet kitty. He's still... I don't know, not comfortable but also not miserable, and we're trying to give him as much affection as we can in whatever time we have left. But he's quieter than I ever remember him being, slower than I ever remember him being, more careful in his movements than I ever remember him being.

He's twenty years old, and I'm pretty sure the cat is dying.

Still worried...

I realized last night that I'm actually completely stressed out about my dad having his second stroke in six months. I mean, it's a couple of other things, too -- the boys making the adjustment to their summer vacation and how we're handling that this year, a dental issue that's pretty mild but is still One More Thing I Have To Deal With, and the usual house cleanup and maintenance. But mainly, it's this thing with Dad.

And I've been doing that thing where I'm completely freaked out but pretending even to myself that everything's okay, or at least that it isn't that bad and we can just keep going through it, and... yeah, that's not so much what's happening. And, of course, I've been telling myself that we really just need to wait and see how this plays out, because there isn't really all that much we can do about it -- which is true, but apparently does nothing to settle the underlying sense of panic. Which means that I'm weirdly unfocused and not making the best choices, when I really need to be working on the things that I can work on.

I think I need some time off, but I need to get some stuff back under control at work, first. (Oh, yeah - there's yet another reason why I'd be, um, unaccountably stressed...) I think I'll see if I can put in for a couple of days around the July 4th holiday - that would combine for a nice extended weekend. And while I'm at it, I should put in now for the first couple of days of school in the fall. I've been meaning to take those off for a couple of years, now.

No new tale to tell, really. Just feeling unproductive, out of control, and really ready to just take a moment for myself.

...Or not.

I was going to try to do some kind of writing last night.

Apparently it was vitally important that we hang doors, instead. Apparently it was critical that we do this now, and -- and I confess I'm baffled by this -- it was equally important to do it ourselves because we're just too exhausted to get professionals in to do it right.

I don't even... You know what? I don't care. It's done. The evening is gone. The doors are hung. Whatever.

I swear, though, the way April is going? We're going to finally get the garage cleaned back out and everything back in place inside the house...

...and it will be just in fucking time for the Zombie Apocalypse to arrive, and force us to evacuate the city entirely.

With my luck, they'll show up right in the middle of Secondborn's birthday party, so we'll end up having to escape with a bunch of traumatized kindergarteners who are screaming for their parents, in a van that's low on gas, with nothing but Batman cake and Capri-suns for supplies.

You just watch. When it happens, I won't even look surprised.