The Emptying of the Vault

We got Firstborn moved into his dorm room. 

Again. 

Left our house. 103F in our area right now. 

Arrived at the college some time later. 104F there. Checked into the hotel, rested up a bit, and then went and got some truly excellent Chinese food for dinner. 

That was when the storm blew through. Big storm. Massive storm. Huge amount of falling water, amazing display of lightning. Just absolutely a blowout. Dropped the temperatures by... I'd say nearly thirty degrees during the night. 

So the next morning we got up, ate the hotel breakfast, and then zipped off to get the key to Firstborn's room. Gave the room a quick check and filled out the preliminary survey on what was already damaged, then headed over to the storage unit and emptied most of it. By now it's gotten thoroughly, painfully sunny -- but the air is still in the mid-eighties.

We get everything unloaded into the room, then go for milkshakes -- or in Secondborn's case, a banana split. 

Went back to the storage unit and emptied the last four items, then got them up to the room and started assembling things. Got the whole thing done was it while still relatively cool, before 2:00 p.m. Secondborn was a huge help with both the lifting and the unboxing, and after that we were able to go back to the hotel room and just collapse for a bit. Firstborn elected to stay behind in his room, I think just settling in and feeling smug about having it all set up. 

Then it rained again. So we got up the following morning and had breakfast while watching the rain and savoring the comparative chill. Secondborn attended a class online from the hotel room, and that gave Firstborn -- who had slept in a bit -- a chance to catch back up with us. So then, before we left, we went to visit a Cat Cafe. I had a nice latte -- something with dark chocolate, cinnamon, and vanilla, and probably also the most concentrated caffeine I've had in the last couple of years, and got to sip and sit while kittens climbed on me and ran around and swatted at things. 

It was healing on an existential level. 

Even more impressive, we managed to leave without any new cats. 

The trip back was overcast, drizzly, and cool for the first half, and then reverted to crazy-hot as we got back into Texas. But it was done, everything is finally settled, and I can return to my ongoing project of learning how to be Normal About Things again.

College Dreams

Dreamt that I was going off to college, and having trouble sorting out everything that I needed to get done (find my room, get unpacked, figure out my schedule...). It wasn't a particularly long or elaborate dream, but it was very definitely a mood -- probably triggered by some combination of Firstborn being away at college himself (parents' weekend is coming up soon) and me settling in on the new job (which I think is coming along fine but there's still a lot I don't know). 

I'm also beginning to think that I might have some unprocessed trauma around going off to college so damned early myself, though I also don't know what we would have done otherwise.

Writing projects are currently at a stand-still; I think I need to give my brain some downtime. 

And sleep. Even with the weird dreams, I need to be getting more sleep. When I get enough sleep, everything else falls into place so much more easily.

Back to Work

Okay, I'm officially back to work. Today is likely to be a slow day, except that we have a project this evening that will involve moving a bunch of workflows over from a training environment and getting them going in actual production; Firstborn seems to be well-settled in his new environment; and Secondborn should be ready to go out the door pretty much any minute now. 

I'm starting to get my breath back, but I've mostly been using my creative energies to get some D&D sessions ready to go. So for today... Oh, I haven't listened to this in a while: 

Annnnnd a day off

All right, yesterday was Collapse And Recuperate Day. Today, Beautiful Wife is back to teaching and I have dropped Secondborn, who A) usually rides his bicycle and B) usually doesn't oversleep, off at school. On time, yet. Go, team! 

...I need to set an alarm so I remember to go pick him up. 

I've also remembered the thing that I was going to order for Firstborn, so I'm going to go do that now. After that, I get a cup of tea and start on cleaning the kitchen, beginning with laundry and dishes and followed by... well, more laundry and more dishes, probably. 

Holy shit, we did it, y'all. 

I hope you all go out and have a really excellent day.

Update #2

Hit a point about 4:30 this afternoon where I was just like, "Did we really go all the way up there and get the boy all set up and then come all the way back?" Not, like, denial exactly. It just feels so surreal. 

And, of course, we have cell phones. We can text him. He can text us. In a real pinch, there might even be phonecalls. It's really not at all like it was when I went away to college, and I have to say this is giving me some interesting perspectives on that experience. \

I'm still off work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be decompressed enough to start with some cleaning; the house isn't desperate yet, but it could sure use some attention. Secondborn stayed with his Nana and biked back and forth to school (pretty much the same way he would have if we'd all been home), and apparently the dog kept coming in to check on him while he was asleep; I am so, so proud of him. He and the dog are both back over here, and I'm trying to figure out how early I can go to bed and still reasonably expect to sleep through the night.

Update to Long Day

 I don't know whether or not this counts as "processing" but I am profoundly exhausted.

Another Long Day

Okay, this one's going up unedited because there's a decent chance that I won't even be awake yet when it posts. Basically: better day, a lot fewer issues, but still very, very long. 

As planned, we popped up and grabbed breakfast at the hotel, then drove over to Firstborn's new dorm, where we were greeted by a pack of upperclassmen who grabbed his stuff out of our vehicles and got it all up to his room. We then managed to get our vehicles removed to an outer parking lot, so other parents could do the same. 

Then we set about trying to get the room into shape, which meant opening all the boxes, sorting out items... and realizing that there were really only three full-sized drawers and one desk drawer in the entire room (not counting the, um, shelf? at the top of the closets). Firstborn's room is built to be a (pretty tight) double and he's occupying it as a single, so it had a good amount of room, but the furnishings were a dresser with three drawers, a desk, and a side-table with another drawer and a storage space underneath -- all three set up as a single desktop underneath the loft bed. (The loft bed looked rickety as hell, but I think it'll hold; it also completely lacked any sort of steps or ladder.) So, we did some creative arranging and Beautiful Wife -- an absolute life-saver -- started making a list of other things that we needed to purchase for his room, starting with shelves and some kind of low cabinet that could hold the microwave. 

By the time we got all that sorted out, it was time to go meet Beautiful Wife's aunt, whom I'll call T, for lunch. You may wonder why we would interrupt the dorm-room setup to go do this when we had only one day to finish; I know I did. As it happens, T is an absolute treasure: delighted to see us, absolutely thrilled to meet Firstborn as a near-adult instead of a kindergartener, and well-connected with the local community. She had some ideas about how to get the medical staples out of the back of Firstborn's head, and was more than willing to accompany him whenever this happened. Plus, the food was really good. 

After that, we headed over to the local Target, which was absolutely swarming with incoming freshmen and their hollow-eyed parents. We went down Beautiful Wife's list, and I found a low cabinet which would fill in the space beside the refrigerator and a matching set of shelves, both of which were intended for garage/workroom/tool storage deployment, so they had sort of a cool warehouse aesthetic, were cheaper than the things intended for room furnishings, and also were much easier to assemble. Beautiful Wife managed, through what I can only consider a effort of pure will, to find a small and completely suitable card table, plus a couple of rugs and some cushions to complete her vision for the room. (I will note for the record here that I did not have a vision for the room; I just wanted to add places to put shit.) We checked out, taking advantage of a New Student Discount that Beautiful Wife knew about (and in the process endeared ourselves to the mother/daughter pair in front of us, who recognized Firstborn because they'd done the tour together and were thrilled to have a 20% discount to justify some extra purchases) then drove back to the campus. 

By then, though, it was time for the Convocation, which... I am bad at describing rituals and ceremonies. They don't do much for me, and I find them tedious. Beautiful Wife, however, tells me that she found it an emotional experience, and that it gave her kind of closure -- like, we were really here, this was really done, Firstborn was really getting started here. So this isn't a knock on the school or the Convocation, it's just One Of Those Me-Things. I will note that the invocation at the end was aggressively non-denominational and as generically religious as anything I've ever seen (while still being effective), enough so that ending it with the much-more culturally specific "Amen" was actually jarring for me. So really, well done on that whole thing.

In theory, after this, we were supposed to make our goodbyes and leave, but... yeah. Furniture. Still in the van, yet. 

So we brought the new purchases up to his room, and I assembled the shelves while Firstborn assembled the cabinet and Beautiful Wife unwrapped and arranged the rest of it. The three-step step-stool (which Firstborn described as a step-step-step-stool) allowed us to pull the broken-down boxes from the back of one of the closets and store them in the luggage space above the closets; it was later positioned to help him get up to his bed. Once we were finished -- amidst a certain amount of fuss over exactly how to arrange everything for the Optimal Dorm Room Experience(tm) -- we had about twenty minutes left before Firstborn was due for an orientation/socializing dinner, and it was definitely time to go. The furniture was arranged, there was at least one poster on the wall, and the room was comfortably his. The microwave fit perfectly atop the cabinet -- I'm still proud of finding something with exactly the measurements we needed to fit it into its little nook beside the refrigerator -- and the work- and play-spaces were arranged to his liking. So we said our goodbyes, Beautiful Wife got some pictures, and I grabbed the Giant Box Of Trash and carried it down to the dumpster. 

I could make some noises about how this was all such a Profound Emotional Experience, but if we're being honest I was too busy doing it to have much in the way of feelings about it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll probably do my actual emotional processing in a couple of days, so it's probably a good thing that I don't have to be back at work until Friday. (New Job takes a while to build up vacation time, but they also hand you a week of it the moment you start so as to cover situations exactly like this, because they're not idiots.) 

Then we turned around and drove all the way back home, because as much as it might have been easier to stop halfway and find a place to stay the night, I really wanted to just put a pin in this whole exercise and mark it as Done. 

So... Good day? I think so. Long day? Definitely. Emotional day? Yeah? Kind of? But also definitely, in some areas? I think we left Firstborn in a room that he can be comfortable in and has kind of marked as his own (which is a lot more important and a lot less superficial than it might sound). I think he was feeling a lot better after assembling the cabinet almost completely on his own, too. I know for a goddamned fact that we weren't the only parents in that particular emotional space, because we could see them all around us and also because we were far from the last to leave. 

This was the kind of quest where I really feel like after all that I should be able to level up, but of course I have to take a Long Rest in order for that to happen. So, on that happy note, good night! I hope you're all already sleeping well by now. You'll see this in the morning, or later, and I may even still be asleep when you do. 

Ye Gods, I love my wife.

Long Day

It's a long way to Arkansas with all the powers of the cosmos conspiring against you. 

What with one thing and another, we didn't manage to get going until nearly three-thirty in the afternoon, so by the time we got settled in to our hotel room it was 10:30 at night. Admittedly, that actually could have been worse, but... the doctor at the Minute clinic said that the staples in the back of Firstborn's head weren't ready to come out, and suggested that we wait until at least Friday; that was the start of the day. We'd intended to leave much earlier than we did, so our departure was marked by a frenzy of last-minute packing and making sure people had their meds with them... and then, of course we hit traffic, though in fairness we might have hit that if we'd left earlier, too. And the hotel parking lot is overrun with construction vehicles from a nearby project, so I'm actually parked at another hotel next door. 

The nice thing about having a plan is that when it all goes to shit you know exactly what you aren't doing.

Tomorrow morning we pop up, grab breakfast, and get Firstborn moved into his dorm room; we also need to talk to somebody about getting his staples removed. There are some Welcome New Students events, and then we're done -- around four-thirty or five, as I understand it. Not sure yet if we'll drive a bit and then stop for the night, or if I'll drive us all the way back in a fit of Let's Just Get This Over With; we'll see how we're feeling.

My new job, at least, hasn't given me even a hint of trouble about any of this. And I remembered to set my out of office and mark myself as on vacation on the staff board, so that was good. We stopped and had an early dinner at The Cracker Barrel, which was fun; I finally remembered how to solve the little peg-board puzzle. And we all made it intact, which I suppose is really the important part. But Lordy are we all tired. I'm going to have a drink and go to bed; a shower would do me good, but I'm not sure I'm up to it. 

Y'all won't see this until tomorrow morning, but goodnight anyway; I hope you were all sleeping soundly while I was typing it.

And so it begins...

Today we depart to take Firstborn to his college. There will be excitement. There will be adventure. There will be Really Wild Things. May the ever-watchful gods of Major Life Changes see us through.

My Annual Nightmare

It's that time of year again - the approach of the Big Local Music Festival - so naturally I'm having Those Dreams again. Actually, they're late this year; usually I have them around the beginning of April. I'm guessing that we've been so busy with other stuff that they got delayed.

What dreams are these? Well...

I was in an old house; I don't know why. But the rest of my housemates were all getting ready for Final Exams, and it occurred to me that I didn't know when my exams were scheduled. Or when my papers were due. In fact, I really hadn't been doing anything, including going to class, all semester. (This may actually mean that I'm getting older; at least in this dream I was in college rather than grade school, and at least I was wearing my pants.)

So I started looking around, and of course I couldn't find the schedule which would have told me what classes I was supposed to have been attending. And then I couldn't find the registrar's office to get another copy of my schedule. Somewhere in there I was walking up a big stone staircase - the college was a wonderfully gothic structure, sprawling across at least one massive hill. Not quite Ghormenghast; think of some of those medieval abbeys, instead.

At the top of the stairs, I helped Firstborn up over the ledge to the top; then I handed up Secondborn, and Firstborn pulled him onto solid ground. No idea why this was necessary, let alone why I thought it was a good idea, but this clearly wasn't a children-falling-from-high-places nightmare, since they handled it just fine. The top of the ledge/hill had a little lakeside area with tables, where people were (of course) studying.

At this point - just after four in the morning - I woke up, got some water and used the restroom, and then went back to bed.

...Where I landed right back in the same NFBSKing dream, still not knowing what tests I was supposed to be getting ready for, what papers I was supposed to be finishing, or whether I was meant to be taking a final exam right now. This time I was trying to figure out if I could take an Incomplete on everything, and either try again next semester or finish up - by which I mean, do an entire semester's worth of work and take all the tests - during the break. I distinctly remember wondering whether I could learn enough to pass just by sitting down and reading through the entire textbook, and whether I had time to do that. Especially since there was more than one class involved.

This continued - I am not making this up - until the alarm went off at a quarter after six.

Note to the denizens of my Anxiety Closet: I'd rather be chased by monsters. Thanks.

I didn't date much

I wish I could remember the conversation that led up to this particular exchange. I remember the scene well enough, though, so let's go with that:

It's my sophomore year of college. I'm in a room in one of the girls' dormitories, talking to one of the girls. Let's call her... Dana, I guess, since I don't know any Danas. (Or is that Danae? Oh, well, never mind.) Anyway, Dana's roommate is also there. She is in the far corner of the room, trying to give the impression that she's working on something instead of eavesdropping on us, when in fact it's glaringly obvious that her whole purpose for still being in the room is to listen in on our conversation.

I should point out that Dana and I were not, in any sense, dating. I was, at the time, busy being the campus ghost, so I never got to know her well enough for anything serious. But we hung out occasionally, and we flirted with each other.

Dana said something that I thought was a little silly. (This is the part that I can't remember.) It might have been some sort of personal advice, or an opinion on whatever-we-were-talking-about. Because I thought it was a little silly, I said, "Yes, dear."

This prompted a little gasp from the far side of the room - you know, over where Dana's roommate definitely was not in any way listening to us. We both heard it, and we both turned to look at the roommate, who explained: "He called you 'dear'."

"Yes," I said patiently, "I do that when I'm being condescending."

Whereupon - WHAM! - Dana punched me in the shoulder. Hard.

Which, I have to admit, I pretty much had coming to me.

Back when I was a ghost...

The place where I spent my first two years of college has always struck me as the perfect setting for a werewolf story.* It's a high-powered University, very intellectual, built on the edge of the cumberland plateau; it's possible to walk from the dormitories, and find yourself in the midst of genuine wilderness - forest, cliffs, caves, wild animals - in a matter of minutes. This suited me; at the time, I was considerably more restless and uncivilized than I am now. If I could have changed myself into a wolf and gone to live in the woods, I probably would have. I'd at least have given the matter serious thought.

The buildings there are built of rough-cut sandstone, and the architecture has a somewhat gothic sensibility: regular and flying buttresses, elegant archways, crenelated walls along the balconies. In addition to encouraging a certain sense of romanticism, these features provide a nearly-irresistible** opportunity for climbing. And being restless and out of place and nearly nocturnal, I did a lot climbing.

The bell tower was a personal favorite, though I never did quite figure out how to get the rest of the way up to the balcony. That's not to say that it couldn't be done; I just never saw a method that I trusted enough to try - and since nobody knew I was up there, I was very cautious about trying things. A large part of that caution was that anything I came up with would also need to be done in reverse, so I could get back down afterwards. That was the consideration that ruled out most of my bright ideas.

But that's a digression, really. The point of this story isn't about climbing things that I probably shouldn't have been. This is a story about being a ghost.

In some ways, I really was a ghost. As I said, I mostly came out at night; I wore a lot of black; I drifted restlessly around campus; I seldom spoke. Socially, that's about all it takes. But one evening, it went a little further.

I was climbing, of course; not on the tower, but on the art building which formed another edge of the central quad. I had gone most of the way up, but instead of continuing to the observatory on the roof, I decided to come in through one of the fourth-floor windows. The window was open (it usually was), and getting to the ledge was no great effort.

However, as I slipped into the room, I saw that I wasn't alone. There was a girl in the center of the room, with her back to me. She had a paint brush in her hand and an easel in front of her. She hadn't heard me come in; she was concentrating on her project, and probably didn't expect to have anyone materialize behind her in an empty room at two o'clock in the morning. For a moment, I considered just climbing back out the window; but I didn't really feel like it... and besides, if she happened to look around and see me, that could lead to questions.

So I put my head up, straightened my long black coat, and walked silently around her and out of the room. I carefully avoided making eye contact; in fact, I ignored her completely.

I'm pretty sure that this is how urban legends get started.

---

* I tried to write one - several times - but I was in my late teens and the results were fairly awful.
** Nearly irresistible for me, at least. Everyone else seemed to resist just fine.