Yesterday:
Penny in bed, avacodo toast for breakfast, a trip out to get some small computer speakers for my downstairs workstation with Penny, a trip to BJs to get odds and ends also with Penny, then home again.
Doggo up again, walk and play and eventually put down again. This cycle Penny did most of the work with Shelley and for that I was grateful. It allowed me to play Prince of Persia: The Crown
I turned the difficulty all the way down and finished the game. For most of the game, at least 70% of it, I was playing with stock difficulty but at the tail end the boss fights became huge to-dos, the kind of thing you wpend a full hour on, each, memorizing patterns and getting the responses hard wired into your head, see this jump and slash by the boss with the red-eye tell, this means you double jump, then at the tip of your seond jump press the shadow button, then dash, then return to your shadow which gives you some extra hang time and allows you one extra jump and dash, so now you jump and dash for the final .5 seconds of hang time, and you've avoided this attack. All that for one attack. The boss will have six or seven of these to memorize and get into your muscle memory.
I did this for one of the snake bosses and then realized: I am not doing this for the others.
Pirate king boss? Cheat.
Valam? Chear
Valam version 2? Cheat.
After the boss fights, difficulty set back to normal, and I would go through the game. Consult map, figure out where to go, use powers to jump around, solve puzzles.
So I finished it and gave it back to Penny. We put the dog down and went to the library. I checked out the Kirby game I've wanted to play for a while on the Switch only to find that it is locked at 30fps. It doesn't look great. There is a patch for it coming out in November along with some DLC but it's $20 and doesn't help me today anyway. So I'm blowing through it as fast as I can, just to get a taste of the experience. My understanding is that it's not a long game. One of the guys on this Youtube channel that I watch called My Life In Gaming said that he unexpectedly loved it, and not because of the challenge (there is very little to be had for a seasoned adult gamer) but because it is unique and does things that no other game does – as a result, he actually felt something close to wonder, at times.
I don't feel wonder but it's interesting to bolt through. As Kirby I have, so far, inhaled cars, vending machines, electronic fan blowers, staircases, and murphy beds. This along with the standard fare Kirby stuff, swords and fire and spikes and so on.
After the library we also hit stop and shop to make sure Penny had everything for the week.
got home. I made a snack. Cheese, crackers, some kind of meat from Stop and Shop that I will spell wrong: Prosscuitto. Then I succummbed, finally, to the desire to nap.
Woke up at 5. Will we or won't we go to the theater to watch the Agatha Christie movie, that's what I wanted to know. I wasn't bugging Penny about it though, I was waiting for her to tell me. I woke up Shelley and took her for a long walk. She peed and pooed twice, the second pool unexpected, and it was tough to re-open the bag to get the extra in there, I fussed with it, got poo on my hands, finally managed to grip it with the top of the bag and get it in there, slipped it in the pocket of my hoodie, tried to ignore the noxious smell.
I vaped, probably too much, until I felt nearly nauseous. I have a bench i use already – after two sessions, it it, in my mind, already an established routine. A bench near the army base entrance. Next to a memorial. There is a small retaining wall around the memorial plaque and statue and there are holes in the mortar and bees come in and out. Shelley is very interested in the bees, sticking her nose into these access holes. She will get stung if we continue to do this, it is only a matter of time.
I get home and Penny gives me the news – she has decided the play is too expensive. She will not admit to me that she simply does not want to go. It's $30 a person. I ask what she wants to do instead. Go out. I point out that going out will be at least as expensive as the play is. She ignores me. She wants to go to the hungry pot. I say no, it is too crowded. We settle on Burtons, neither of us have been there. We haven't gone out to eat, not properly, not at a sit down restaurant, in probably a month and a half. Since our anniversarry May 7. She gets semi drunk. She tells me stories she's told me a thousand times before. Instead of telling her she is repeating herself like I usually do, I just listen and laugh at the right spots. She has had a long week. She can have a night out with me and have me not behave like a jerk. I see her skin flush. On the way out I look at her in the parking lot and tell her she looks pretty and mean it.
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Today: I am about to get the dog and do that for a while. Probably hang out in bed and make love to Penny after that. It looks like she is not going to see her friend Effy today, Effy who initially said she wanted to get together but then put her off yesterday. Effy the immature bitch. Effy the idiot. Effy who is forty years old and sitll lives with her parents.
So I will have Penny all day. Penny and Shelley.
I need to work out today – biceps and shoulders and back. I will do that instead of attic work. I managed to seal the zone 3 duct yesterday, it only took half an hour. The mastic is curing. If I still have energy after my weight workout and Penny is reasonably happy without me - she may not be, she often isn't – I may do another session up there. Turn that zone on, make sure no leaks. Do more of the attic reflectix staping.
Or I may settle in and work on this blog. I want to get the menu set.
That's all I have for now, 8:05 and time to get doggo, start the day
Early but not too early on Saturday, seven thirty.
I had my trio of drugs: caffeine, lexapro, monafinil.
I probably have ten minutes to write and then the day starts. Penny needs her morning time with me – maybe we'll make love, maybe we won't – we'll walk the dog, have something to eat, figure out what we are going to do today.
Penny wants to go to see an agatha christie play at the town theater tonight. I agreed to go and the first thing I think isn't “This will be fun” but rather “what will we do with the dog and how is this going to fuck up my day and how boring will this be?”
Boring. This from a guy who was in the attic yesterday walking floor joists and stapling heat reflective aluminum to the roof beams.
That's what I did yesterday: Two hours of HVAC shit in the attic – I worked through getting some big strips of the reflective material affixed to the beams. I realized I will need more material to finish the job so I ordered another 250 sq foot roll, too. I'm probably half done with the reflectix but I have painful work to go yet – the entire side of the house, the rear side, the side with the air handler on it, is full of awkward spaces and it will be difficult to roll large sections of the material out like I just did on the front facing side. Instead it will be a lot of painstaking cutting and smaller peices. I was a mess after this work was done, just covered in dust and particles – so bad that I decided to actually wash the set of clothes before I go and do another round of this shit.
Then I took a break for ten minutes and went back upstairs and worked on the hose that goes to zone 3, the spare bedroom. I figured out how long the flex duct really should be if i am doing a straight shot from the main channel and cut it. Cleared out the space next to the vent (register) box so I could attach it. I attached it and tried to seal it. Let's call it round 1 of sealing – I used the loc tite spay foam liberally. It'll stick, it's not going to fucking go anywhere. Round 2 will be using mastic goo everywhere to make sure that things are sealed. I will do this today if I get a chance. The mastic will have to dry and set a little before round 3, which will be to get the sleeve back on – the insulating sleeve – and use the zip cable to get it snug. Then I can push the blow in insulation back into spaces where things have been completely disrupted. That will be it for zone 3 – then I can go back to getting the reflectix up. Or alternate between the two things.
It's over already. My time. Penny came downstairs, I made her a coffee, and she is happily babbling away on the couch about her job and things that happened this week.
This is one of the hardest problems I have with marriage in general and/or Penny specifically: she goes and goes and goes.
She goes silent, looks at her computer. It may give me another ten minutes.
I worked on the attic instead of working for Boston College yesterday. I had good energy most of the day, a welcome change, as most of the week was a struggle.
In the afternoon I spent an hour cleaning the basement and straightening things. I threw all of my tools and screws and odds and ends into various boxes and just put them into a big cabinet and shut the door on it so it looks better and things are out of the way. It's still a complete organizational nightmare but at least it's out of sight out of mind kind of shit. My desk is set up underneath the light and I forced myself to use it a bit. I hooked up the monitor and got a halfway decent keybaord attached to it instead of the $5 peice of gargage that I got from the seller of the old PC,. I logged into it and tried to get sound working out of the display, which I was able to do, but I discovered has just about the worst possible sound quality I've ever heard out of anything, reminding me of thse old $2 headphones I sometimes would use in the 90s that had zero bass and even the treble sounded like a fucking kazoo. So that isn't going to work for audio, not even casually. But the rest of it is fine, I was able to work a little bit on my blog – this thing. I got an image set up, a header image, showing pIcard looking at a viewportt where he is typing. It's the right idea but the wrong image. I will think about what to do next with it, but it's better than nothing for now. I also worked on templating shit so I can have the same header on all pages. And I have to log in to post now which is good for securty blah blah.
Time to get the dog.
Friday morning.
I played Prince of Persia for ten minutes on switch and decided that it would be better to write for the remaining twenty minutes of silence before the day starts.
I went in for the department meeting yesterday but left halfway through. Listened to Father Leahy speak while I stood with my back against the wall at the very end of the room. I let people see I was there. Who cares if they later realize that I left. It doesn't matter. I ran into Phil, I saw Phani and Sriram. We barely said anything to one another. We live different lives, it's OK.
Father Leahy is retiring, or maybe has already retired. He spoke about Messina College, formerly Pine Manor, which my university acquired a few years back to save them from a covid related financial death spiral. He became president of the university before I was even a student there, some forty years ago. He spoke easily and without cards or any presentation material. He touched on reduced or eliminated grants and funding from the Federal government for basic University stuff: research subsidies, for example. He said, without directly saying it, that this administration is a mess. He was able to say it by talking about policies that they've enacted. It was a smart way to do it.
I found, not for the first time, grudging respect for these Jesuits. I'm an athiest and I expect I always will be, but not all people of faith are morons, either. Father Leahy struck me as bright, polished, level headed, curious and caring – all of these things at once. And this, despite being in his mid seventies.
I will not achieve what he has achieved and at this point in my life I think it's OK to admit and accept this. The knowledge gives me humility.
So I went home during the ice breaker, like I often do. There are no repercussions. I didn't work for the rest of the day either.
I bought an e-cigarette machine after that. I felt faded on the drive home, semi transparent, a dimly lit consciousness peering out of my head into the world. Drove to Framingham Vape and Smoke. What a name. The last smoke shop I went into was years ago, some place near the Purple Shamrock in downtown Boston. I didn't even buy anything, just went in drunk one day. Must have been twenty years ago. This was the same night I saw a couple of guys fighting outside the Shammy and one went down and the other kicked him in the ribs a few times. It sounded like nothing, like a foot hitting a bit of well packed luggage, nothing like the movies. It made me feel sick.
At the Vape and Smoke I bought a Vapresso unit. I asked the guy behind the counter what was popular, what did he recommend. He didn't seem to care much about anything. Didn't ask me if I was a new vaper. It was probably obvious, he was probably able to put it together from the kind of questions that I asked. After some prompting he said things that helped me make up my mind:
So this one has a better battery. This one has larger cartridges for the liquid. This fluid is flavored like tobacco and the other tastes like nothing. We don't sell flavors anymore because of government regulations.
I bought a $35 unit and spent another $20 on the first round of fluid. I asked if this was all I needed and he said yes.
As I left the store I saw another white guy walk in, maybe mid twenties, looked like a healthy suburban kid. I was surprised, I always expect to see people that appear to be on the brink of homelessness in these fucking stores. Tiny store too, rectangular, like the size of a cargo box or something. Sometimes I wonder how people survive working in such places. Serving products you don't care about to people like me who don't care about you. Not much interesting to learn. A lot of deadspace and downtime.
I got home, hid the packing material, tried it. Despite the guy telling me that it's flavorless, it's not. It tastes slightly sweet, maybe a hint of cinnamon. Almost pleasant. You pull – you put your lips up to the mouthpeice, there is a hole in in, you make a seal with your lips, and you breathe in. As airflow moves through the unit, the elctrics are activated and burn the liquid into vapor. By the time it hits your lungs, it is vapor.
I don't know what the right amount is or anything, I am just pulling some and holding it in. I am trying not to use it any more than I was smoking.
I made it through yesterday without having a real cigarette and I expect to do the same today.
I have therapy at nine and have to get the dog up because if I don't allow her to be up for an hour and a half before therapy I fear she won't settle. And i have trash pickup to worry about too. Maybe I willl write more later, we'll see. But this will do for now.
It is seven AM. I am in my usual spot on the living room carpet. I hear birds sing outside and wait for stimulants to kick in: caffeine, amodafinil, lexapro. There is a sour taste in my mouth from attempting to ingest the amodafinil sublingually.
In twenty minutes I will get up and make sure I am ready to to into work. I work for a large university in the Boston area and it is our bi-yearly department meeting. Because I work from home so much, it is necessary for me to always, always, always attend these big department meetings and say hi to at least a few people so they remember I am employed there. Face time and so on.
This job requires, by far, the least amount of face time I have ever worked and for that I love it. It is the main reason I won't seriously look for another job unless I know it's a great fit and I can work from home most of the time, the same way that I do here.
Being that I'm approaching fifty and no one is exactly banging down the door to hire people getting this close to AARP eligibility, I don't expect to have another job before the end of it all. I expect this to be it.
In a few more minutes I will get the dog and we will go outside and I will pee/poop her. I will get in my car around seven forty five or seven fifty and drive into the office. My plan is to try to park near the reservoir, where there is sometimes an open spot at this time of day, someone in the nearby apartments leaving for work, for example. If I have to kill time I can go to the cafeteria and sit in the downstairs section and look at my phone, play the nyt puzzle games.
I look skinnier. I have my green shirt on and I don't fill it out as well. Here is something that I did not expect to happen when I quit drinking six months ago: I would not be working out as hard. Since I won't work out as hard, I fear I am shrinking a little bit muscularly. Maybe this is all in my head. I do not know, I do not preen in front of the camera and take pictures from all angles and thoroughly examine them. I am more the put-on-a-shirt-and-eyeball-myself-for-a-second-in-the-mirror type of guy. My eyeballs told me today that I am skinnier, and not in a healthy looking way. It is more in the I-am-getting-old-and-frail kind of way.
Today is the day I stop smoking. I came up with a strategy to stop. It is to not buy any more.
I smoked four or five yesterday and I can still feel them today in my lungs. It's okay, I know it will clear out fast – a few weeks and the majority of gunk in my lungs will have been cleared, a few months and it's back to virtually normal, virtually pink again, a year and it's no longer virtually, it's complete.
I took up smoking again as a way to stop drinking and it did work. It did help. It gave me something to look forward to, a way to focus my breaks from work, and a seret to hide from Penny. I would smoke next to the shed after she left. I'm aware that it's only a matter of time before she catches me – goes into the shed for some reason and finds that it smells like smoke, or raises the lid to the black weber grilll and discovers the ten or so empty packets of cigarettes, Camel Blue and Marlborough Light, along with a pack of matches. I have become increasingly lazy about hiding it. For the first month I would have my last cigarette around four and then shower before she got home. Nowadays I smoke, change my shirt, run listerine through my mouth and brush everywhere – top of mouth, tongue, under tongue, sides – maybe not even floss – then gargle a second. Wash face with soap. Done.
Even with these precautions, here is all it takes to be caught: Penny comes home unexpectedly. Starts to head to work, realizes she forgot something, home – I am downstairs smelling like smoke, caught. Or worse I am outside smoking and doggo is inside and I am leaving it alone. Caught.
She will be in tears, I need you, I can't live without you, we are trying to have a baby together, I have no one else.
I know this because when she caught me smoking two years ago that was the drill. It took a while for her to forget about it and trust that I was no longer smoking. I don't want to do that again.
I may go to the vape store on the way back from my meeting and get a device so I can still have nicotine, still have a break from work, still have a secret, but stop smelling like tobacco – stop worrying about Penny catching me doing something she will crucify me for, stop filling my lungs with tar.
The nicotine isn't good for me but it can't be worse than what I'm doing.
I have to get the dog up and start my day.
I only have about ten minutes to write today. At seven fifty on the dot I will wake up doggo and start the day. It will be hard to write once she is up – it will be the usual poop pee walk then talk about shit with Penny, get into life's shit.
I had trouble sleeping last night. It might have been all the stimulants I'm on, or it just might have been a bad night. They happen sometimes. I kept thinking about the next steps in my stupid work projects, and my HVAC project, and why I'm not writing, and why I don't feel more free. I should feel about as free as any man who isn't independently wealthy can – I'm 48, in decent health, white, not terrible looking, not yet aged out of society – I have some money, certainly enough to “do mostly whatever I like” even though I'm generally careful with money. But I don't feel free – I feel trapped in my days, trapped by my dog, my wife, my house, my job, trapped by myself.
My friend Sheldon in New Hampshire wrote me a long email that I read right before I went to bed. He is in the same industry as myself – IT/Software – but on the sales side for a big well known company. He is probably the only person in my life that 100% understands what I do and I sometimes take advantage of this fact to bore him with absurdly nerdy stories about what I am up to at home or at work. I can tell him I got streaming working from one PC to another using sunshine and moonlight at 1080p at 60fps and he knows. I can tell him I am using python and a variety of screen scraping methods to extract data from a vendor app's UI so we can store it in JSON format and this instantly makes sense to him. I can inform him that zone 3 of my upstairs HVAC unit is finally working because I rewired the therm to get Y2 connected and he'll know about that too. These things make sense to him, they are projects worth doing and things worth knowing.
The gist of his email is that he went to see his failing mother in AZ instead of going to a work conference. “Took a page out of The Last Captain's playbook and skipped the conference, knew I'm a senior person and they won't do anything about it.” (The Last Captain is me. I often tell Sheldon that I skip things at work that I don't feel like doing – a lot of the face time-y networking-type of activities that I despise.
He expects a response today. I might ask AI to help me write one once Penny has gone to work.
Yesterday: Because it was cool out I decided to work on the attic some. I started putting up this heat reflective sheeting between the ceiling joists called Reflectix. It stops radiant heat from coming in and is pretty effective from what I read online. I wanted to see how easy or hard it is to put up and it's not bad. big 4' wide silver roll. I undo some on the floor, cut peices out, staple them to joists. I am wearing my full PPE gear now – my shitty shoes, long jeans, long sleeve shirts, an n95 mask. It makes the work hotter but also more manageable because i don't feel quite as gross.
So I got a bunch of that up but then got stuck because I did decide to move the flex duct on the registers.
In the middle of the night I came up with this plan.
Once that is done I can also get the reflective barrier up on the roof behind that register and do that general area. I can get a lot done on the reflectix project quickly if I move, move, move, don't think too hard, it's just fucking insulation, I'm not breaking anything, it's not rocket science or even computer science or even scripting shit for my shitty job.
I have to go get the dog. My mood was overall shit yesterday btw for the first part of the day, the largest chunk, and I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about my mother and her side of the famly and their addictive and depressive tendencies and hating them all for the things that I have inherited.