Yesterday I faced Father's Day.

I am, kind of sort of, a dad for the first time.  Not a real father, not the Human kind of father with a Human kind of son.  What I have is a puppy, a ten month old puppy, a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, white-and-tan, named Shelley.

I am a doggy daddy, according to my wife Penny.  When Penny speaks in the doggy voice (we each speak in the doggy's voice sometimes in an attempt to articulate Shelley's thoughts) she will often start with “papa!”  

As in:  “Papa!  I am going to need another strawbunkle!”  (Strawbunkle is what the BFG calls strawberries in Dahl's book The BFG.  Penny is a children's librarian and we often make jokes that revolve around children's books.)

“Papa!  I need to go pee!  IMMEDIATELY!”

“Papa!  Don't you understand I absolutely need to investigate and lick everything in the dish washer when you have it open?”

One thing I barely write about are the details of the hours I spend with the dog, which seems strange now that I think about it, to have something I spend so much time doing be so thoroughly unexamined.  It is probably because the routine of it numbs me to the details.  

I put her harness on, a loop that goes over her head, before we go outside, and notice her little nose that she points upward, toward the enter of the ring, to help me get it on without too much trouble.  When she does this her ears flop back a little.  

I am often still surprised by her softness.  She will come up to me when I am on the floor typing on my laptop, trying to do work or order something, and nuzzle my hands or my ankle.  It's gentle and feels nice.  Then she'll do a huff-and-snort to indicate she got whatever she was looking for.  Investigation complete.  Job done.  

Penny and I laugh when we eat on the couch and her head will suddenly pop up, her paws resting on the vertical side of the couch because she isn't tall enough to make it to the top, her body upright in this position.  She will look from me to Penny and back again, a hungry, accusatory look in her face.  Normally I don't think dogs have expressions but in this case the look is clear:  You are eating without me.  I am going to need some food.  Penny thinks she looks outright panicked.  

I don't disagree.  One of the most alarming life events for our dog is to see we are eating or snacking and she is not.  It is unfair.  I am reminded of studies that have been done that prove beyond a doubt that animals feel jealousy.  Like the grape study with chimps where a bunch of chimps are given either a piece of celery (a low grade treat) or a grape (a great treat).  Once the chimps realize that grapes are given out, they won't take the celery any more, and they get mad at the chimps who are being given grapes.  

I'll move on

--

After we made love I went downstairs and mixed pancake batter, heated a griddle, put four of them on for Penny.  She likes it when I make them small.  I heat up maple syrup with some butter in the microwave and douse the pancakes with the mix right before she eats them.  I use the rest of the batter to make a big fat pancake for myself.

I want to do work on the attic and I want to exercise but I do these things first because Penny needs a Sunday morning of spoiling or she doesn't feel right.  Part of Penny's idea of marriage is that her man spoils her, especially on Sunday mornings.  

After she ate she looks depressed, sitting on a chair at the kitchen bar.  I move to her and ask what's on her mind.  She tells me her dad was in a dream.  He was trying to tell her something but she couldn't understand.  She starts crying.  She wanted to understand.  It was important.

I thought about her Dad's last year of life.  Demented.  LIterally, dementia.  Talking nonsense.  I wondered if this was what she was remembering in her dream, the difficulty of trying to understand.

Penny is up.  This is over.

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.

--

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.

• Take the flex duct off the register for zone 3.  I don't need this zone to be working downstairs.
• point the hose somewhere in the attic safe, and semi-secure it so the air pressure doesn't blow it around.
• viola, now you have AC in the attic for the remainder of this stupid project, turn on zone 3 and you are cool upstairs.

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.

No entry yesterday.  I couldn't quite make myself do it.  I woke up at the usual time but played Prince of Persia on the Nintendo Switch instead.  Penny got it out of the library for me and I am doing my best to finish it as quickly as possible.  It's a 2D Metroid type game, the kind where you unlock an ability and that is sort of the ‘key’ that allows you to progress to a different area of the map.  A double jump allows you to reach a new door.  The air-dash yet another undiscovered location, because now you can span a small horizontal gap in the wall while airborne.  And so on.  These games are about exploration, traversing mazes, solving small puzzles, and loneliness.

Yes, lonelliness.  These are not games that you play with friends, either in-game or outside.  There is no multiplayer co-op.  No voice chat.  Within the game you do not have a sidekick or familiars or a radio buddy telling you where to go.  There is you in this unfamiliar location, trying to figure things out, and that is that.

I realized last night that I am going to finish this game.  In a world where I probably only complete half of the games I play, I will finish this one.  I will do this because I hit a point where the music – a soft arabian tune – started to get in my head and haunt me.  That feeling of loneliness I used to feel as a kid came back to me – a loneliness that I tried to ignore, in part, by playing video games.  I could get immersed in the puzzles and challenges and forget about my parents and the problems at school and all of the ways in which I didn't measure up and instead just work on this game.  Figure it out.  What did they want me to do here?  How do I kill this enemy?  Is there a better way to position my hand on this controller so I can more consistently tap a certain button with ease and speed?  

So I played that for a while and took doggo out and exercised – I did my first weight workout since Thursday.  I will do another tomorrow.  I saw Penny off to work and smoked a cigarette and then I felt unbelievably lethargic.  

The guy from Enphase came over and installed the new monitoring panel for my solar system.  I had forgotten he was even scheduled to come and then suddenly at ten in the morning I am getting texts saying he will be late and he is apologizing and I am thinking who cares, I didn't even know you were going to be here.  He liked Shelley.  His wife is a veteranarian in New Hampshire.  They have two Yorkis and temporarily seven because the bitch gave birth to five pups but they will re-home them or sell them.  it's a whole thing is what he told me.  sounds like a lot of stories there i told him.

Something successful writers all agree on:  Writing takes discipline.

Something I seem to lack when it comes to writing:  discipline.

I am going to do my best to be more discipllined this morning.  I will take Shelley out at seven forty five and we will do our loop.  I'll feed her and chat with Penny for a while.  Then I willl sit at the table and let Shelley figure out how to entertain herself.  I may put the bark buzzer on her.  I may get the clicker out – it may be time to return to click training to fix some behaviors.  And I will try to work, with my laptop on the kitchen table.  I will file the JIRA issue for the automated restarts for Apache on Novell Access Manager.  I will figure out how to disable and re-enable the monitoring on the F5 when these jobs fire.  I will do this in the PERF environment so as to not fuck anything up and I will document everything on our wiki.

What I would really like to do is put Shelley in my office so I can work there and have her fuck around within sight of me now that I can trust her to not pee and poop all over the place.  But not today.  That is too much for today.  This is already a day in which I am filing issues and scripting and probably also doing laundry.  What else can I add to make the day's goals completely unachievable?

More HVAC work in the attic.  Rewriting Patterns.  Finishing my screen scraping project.  A heavy workout.

I don't have nearly enough energy to do these things.  I need useful energy too.  For the work project I outlined, it is not enough to be awake.  There needs to be the tickle of desire, and desire needs fuel.  If I am underslept there is no desire to do anything.  

I was definitely underslept yesterday.  I napped twice, could not seem to get it going. 

While I smoked my afternoon cigarette, out on the rusting soccer goal frame left by the previous owners of this house, my ass pressed against the two inch metal bar that does the horizontal span to hold the top section of the net as I sat on it, a bunny came up to me.  It's the closest a bunny has ever come to me.  These are the most unafraid rabbits I have ever seen in my life.  The only thing that makes them really run from me is Shelley lunging at them.  Big black eyes on the sides of the head – a herbavore feature, a prey feature, eyes on the sides to maximize view, to scan for predators.  It nibbled on the tops of grasses as I pulled from the cigarette and pulled smoke into the air.  Just an hour before I ordered 128 oz of laboratory grade ethelyne glycol.  I will soak apple slices in it and see if they eat it.  It's pure and it's sweet.  The stuff I got from the store a couple of weeks ago had a bittering agent added.  This is why the bunnies didn't eat it.

I am going to kill this bunny i said to myself, half in disbelief, as it sat a mere two feet away from me.  I thought about it dying due to kidney toxicity.  That's how the ethylene glycol does its work.  It's not a fun way to go.  

Maybe I won't do it.  

But I have to find something to do.  Another warren hole appeared in my yard yesterday. This is the fourth I've discovered.  There may be more I don't know about.   They will breed and destroy everything if I can't find a solution. 

Cat?  Mongoose?  Isn't the end result the same if I get a critter-killer?  Death for the rabbits?

Time to start the day.

Computer:  Today I am up early again.  

It is six forty five and I am downstairs in my spot on the rug writing and waiting for drugs to kick in:  caffeine, modafinil, lexapro.

I am doing this because it might be my only bit of quiet time today.  Time to myself.  If I don't get it now, I won't get any. 

Because today will go:  Penny and lovemaking, then doggo duties, then Penny again because we are driving down to Millis to visit a farm that she has been talking about all week.  They have a dining area and we will sit and eat something, people watch, take-it-all-in.  

The weather is decent today, mid sixties, only partial sun – fully acceptable weather for Jennie, who instantly wilts with anything over eighty.  To pick or not to pick will be the question.  It's strawberry season and I'm sure the farm will have pre-picked berries at their stand but it may be that Penny wants to bend down and have the experience of manually gathering some.  We may take a hybrid approach, too – pick the minimum amount, buy another quart on top of that.  

By the time we get home we will need to wake the dog up again.  And we will be discussing mundane things like:  Should we go to Market Basket?  (Probably.)

Yesterday I didn't get as much of the attic done as I wanted.  I did about an hour and a half up there, fully protected this time, long sleeve shirt and jeans and sneakers.  (The protective gear helped, I wasn't as itchy last night and slept okay.). I was able to finish wrapping the zone 2 ductwork in the reflective bubblewrap and seal it all together as best I could so that there aren't any air leaks.  That's the key from all the information I've gathered online:  No leaks.  You can't let air from the attic touch the metal ducting or you will probably have condensation issues in the summer when it's hot and rather humid in the attic but the ducting is cold from the AC cycle.  Water will gather on the ductwork and weep.  It may be even worse if you put something on the ductwork but don't get it air-sealed because then you trap moisture and can have mold issues.  So you want that first barrier against the duct to be air tight or very very close.  I wrapped four foot wide sections of foil around the duct and used mastic tape to seal edges, working hard to line things up with the tape, and press-press-press the edges, running my fingers up and down several times, reminding myself that once-is-not-enough, forcing myself to work slowly and deliberately.  I did the areas around the flex duct exits too – these are the most awkward parts because of all of the irregular shapes, cones of metal sprouting off of the rectangular section, difficult to seal or mastic or tape or anything.  Parts I covered with the plastic sheeting that I got, cutting the right shape (or close enough) out of the roll, covering whatever bit I wanted to seal with that plastic, then carefully taping every part of the plastic over the duct itself.  Sort of like a seamstress putting a patch on jeans, you lay the patch down over a hole and sew the edges onto the original fabric.  

So I finished the two flex ducts, then wrapped a big piece of insulation around the third flex duct, the one that goes to my office, the one that is going to be on most of the time.  I zip-lined it to hold it together and then wrapped the entire thing in plastic again, then worked once more on, you guessed it, taping, taping, taping.   Positioning myself for work on this register absolutely sucked, feet pushing into cellulose insulation, shoes fully submerged in the stuff – it looks like gray hamster bedding – thoughts of “will i have to wash my shoes after this to get it out” – always more work for myself being created even as I am doing work for some other project – I bend over and crouch and huff and puff.  I tell myself this is all good for me and think of friends my age, forty eight, who would not be up for this task:  surely Brian, who is overweight, could not do this work.  Nor his fattie wife.  Sheldon in New Hampshire might be able to do it but might not – he's tall and it would stress his back more than mine.  My calves ache and I wonder why.  

At some point, when I am on my back on the floor with my head sticking up past the duct, finishing the taping on the final bit, I run out of tape.  I bought tons of it but even so somehow burnt through four 100' rolls over the course of this project.  That's the end of the day's work.  

I go outside, it is pouring rain, and smoke a cigarette in the shed with the door open.  I know this is going to make my clothes smell like cigarettes and this is a concern with Penny not knowing that I'm smoking but it seems to not matter.  Everything needs to be washed anyway, because of the insulation.

I decide to go back upstairs and just clean a bit.  It is eleven thirty at this point.  I am tired but convince myself to do it.  Once I am moving the motion of my own body keeps me going.  I sweep bits of insulation into a dustbin and scrape bits of mastic off the floor and arrange all my tools in one pile and all my materials – big fiberglass bats of insulation, the plastic sheeting roll, the zip ties – in another section.  i throw my insulation-ridden temp clothing down the stairs to be washed later.  Then at the very end I decide to open the tub of mastic and go over a few sections because hey, it will have time to cure, given that I'm not doing any more work up here today.

Then I shower and carefully scrub myself and lay down for twenty mintues to re-set a little bit.  I eat the rest of yesterday's sushi on my bed upstairs, telling myself I have to remember to throw out the plastic tray or Penny will know I've been eating in bed.  I fall asleep but not really asleep, a light sleep, something I think is more in line with meditation than sleep.  I imagine a foreign psychiatrist speaking to me, asking me questions.  That's my go-to self-soothing mechanism nowadays.  (It sure beats my old mechanism, which I will not talk about here, but it was a destructive mechanism, not good for me.). 

He asks why the insulation project is so important

I tell him I need to be efficient and busy.  It's good work and it's good to be busy.

He asks what else I would rather be doing than this project and I tell him nothing

He says that is not true, this project is misery, he can see me scratching my arms and there is insulation in my hair and I have small cuts and bruises from shimmying over the floor

I say fine I know you want me to say something provocative so here it is:  drinking drinking drinking drinking

and why do we drink

because we are not writing, because we are not following our dreams, because I am not doing anything that makes my mother proud:  I am not doing anything artistic.

now we are getting somewhere, he says, and I fall asleep.

Eight fifteen in the morning.  I lay in my customary spot on the living room floor and try to gather myself.  

Tired.  Despite all the drugs I took, I am tired.  Didn't sleep well. Wish I wasn't doing the attic work but that's what I have planned.  Penny will be at work and I will create our dog Shelley in an hour or so and then it will be off to the attic to try to finish insulating the last duct.  I will wrap the zone in the reflective bubble wrap and try to make it air tight around the metal duct.  I will wear long sleeves to protect my arms from the fiberglass.  This was my mistake yesterday:  I was up there shirtless, wearing nothing but my boxers, and it got all over me, the fiberglass insulation.  It makes me itchy and gross – I was scratching myself even in the middle of the night, scratching my arms and chest.

My dog brings me toys while I try to write:  a purple octopus that my sister bought for us, a ball attached to a blue tugging strap.  We've been outside already, walked around the block, pee and poop and sniffy times.  I close my eyes and hold a toy in my left hand and she will tug at it and then try to grab it from me.  If she succeeds in wresting it away, she will then try to place the toy on my lap, between me and my computer.  I cannot type when she does this.  I close my eyes and feel the pull of sleep.  I am low on sleep.  The drugs help me to stay awake but they do not give me fuel - they do not give me the core energy I need to do what I need to do today.  It may be that I need to eat something.  This is what I never read in fiction:  The constant brain chatter about "should I do this, should I do that."  Should I drink some more water, would that help me to feel more up to the tasks ahead of me?  Eat an apple?  Have a yogurt?  Can I have more caffeine or will that just make me more tired the way that having too much sometimes does?  I probably need to move around – I have not done enough formal exercise this week.  My routines have been ruined by the dog and the attic project – I have been throwing my useful energy into sweating upstairs, taping things, crawling around in small spaces and huffing and telling myself to keep going because this is my chance to get it done.  Today is a little cooler than yesterday but it will become crazy hot after noonish and then every ten minutes up there starts to feel like an hour.  That's what happened yesterday – I did a final bit of work between noon and one and it destroyed me.  Got the first zone completely done but then – kaput.  

I asked Penny what she thought the most influential book she'd ever read was.  I got in response:  Dracula, Frankenstein, The Handsmaid's Tale, The Belle Jar, everything by Austen.  

Characters in books do not seem to wonder if they have taken too long to respond to a friend's email, or if they've had the recommended eight glasses of water, or given enough attention to their dog.  

Today I am sure I will spend a lot of time convincing myself that the attic work is a good enough workout for the day, even though I haven't done any weight work since Wednesday morning.  It seems like too long a gap.  I worry I will start to get smaller.  Then I will worry about not having any time to myself tomorrow, since it is a Family day, a Me-And-Jennie-And-Doggo day, and I will do whatever she wants to do.

I must be in a shitty mood because everything seems black right now.  

I feel lost a great deal of the time, even as I feel I shouldn't.

I sit in bed at 4:15 today.  I took a nap and finished the training that I had no interest in – the BASEcamp training about identiy management.  I got very little out of it if you want to know the truth, and even writing that down makes me feel silly and stupid.  I should have gotten more out of it, I think to myself.  Other people got more out of it.

To me it's half buzzwords and half people talking about their backgrounds and how they wound up where they wound up and that kind of thing.  I don't care.  

I have forty five minutes until Penny gets home and I should be allowing myself to just sit and exist.  I tried reading a bit and stopped after six or seven pages.  I'm working my way through the Thursday Murder Club and it's not bad.  Better than Anxious People, the only other book i've read this year.  Man that was a turd, I don't think I'll be reading anything else by Fredrick Backman.  Too cutesey.

This book, TMC, has some cutesey stuff in it but feels more grounded and well thought out.  Some characters are legit hard and cynical, like Ian Ventham, the diabolical condominium developer who is scheming to build his next set of units on top of a graveyard.  Well, not on top.  They are going to move the bones first.  The bones will be moved by diggers – lowest bid won the contract.  It will not be pretty.  Graves will most certainly be upset and spoilt.

My skin itches from the insulation work this morning.  Itches and tiny pin pricks and zaps.  It will be better tomorrow probably.  Some of the fibers have worked their ways into my pores.  

I've decided that I will offer Penny the choice of sushi or Chinese tonight so I can avoid cooking.  I've been cooking something or other all week and wouldn't mind a night off.  My guess is that she wouldn't mind some filthy chinese herself.

Eleven twenty two in the morning.  I'm in my office, having just smoked a cigarette, eaten a peanut butter sandwich, and showered.  Porcupine tree plays on my phone, the Anesthetize album.  The shower was necessary because I'd been in the attic for an hour and twenty minutes doing – you guessed it – more HVAC work.  I silicon sealed the leak to the master bedroom so that, later today, I can stuff some insulation around it and then plastic-wrap seal the whole thing.  

Then I put insulation back for one of the three sections on zone 2, the one to my office.  It's painstaking work.  Wrap insulation, tape, more tape, adjust, stuff more insulation back in, tape, seal.  I bought a big bag of R13 unfaced at home depot yesterday and I plan to wrap that around the ducts to give it even more insulation.  I ordered radiant barrier to install between roof joists, to reduce radiant heating that makes the space a hundred and twenty degrees when it's just 80 outside.  Every time I finish something I see another improvement.  I am hanging the flex duct from joists to remove ninety degree angles.  I am probably going to get the flex duct off the ceiling and hang it instead because if it hangs, I can 1. reduce the path by probably ten feet and 2.  get it to be more or less horizontal instead of up and then down again, in an arc, plus 3 the top of the attic is the hottest part and having the ducts up there guarantees the greatest energy loss.  

But doing this is probably several hours more work.  I am trying to decide now just how much I will want to do this afternoon.  I have the BASEcamp stuff for work - people presenting, discussing shit, and I tried to mix that in with work yesterday with mixed results – I wound up exhausted.  

Who the fuck installed this shit?

I think I will want one of those 95 masks for when I move the duct because I'm up to my ankles in cellulose insulation and the dust gets pretty intense.  I know it's not good to breathe.  

All the while I work, I wonder why I am doing this.  Am I happy doing this work?  Shouldn't I be writing or working on other goals?  If I were Ryan I would be noodling on guitar or playing a video game or doing something on the internet.  This is how I'm choosing to spend my time instead.  Re-doing my fucking ductwork.  It makes me think that I'm crazy or OCD or unbalanced or whatever.  Even now I am thinking i probably should go to home depot and get the mask and the heat foam for sealing the registers after I move the duct work.  

Although, instead of that, I could do a more casual, leisurely thing and finish insulating the zone 2 duct.  That's probably a better thing to do. Get something finished before I start on the next big part.  If I finished sealing the route to the bedroom and then did the zone 2 duct, that would be a lot of work for today and I could call it done.  Move the ducts another day, if I feel like it.  I don't have to.  There's no requirement to do anything after I get the rest of the main duct insulated, you know.

I'm going to do and do the next section and then log into the meetings at work and see how it all goes.  

I didn't have therapy this morning because I took it on Wednesday instead – my guy is out today.  Doctor appointment with his wife.  They are having a baby.  I think he'd been hiding this from me because I have been working through IVF with my wife and it's been such a struggle.  He probably didn't want me to be jealous.  

I think I am still depressed.  I don't think I've ever stopped being depressed – I've just accepted it as a part of my life.  

One way to look at the HVAC shit is that it keeps me busy – motivated and pushing forward and trying as best as I can to stay out of my head too much.  That, I am pretty sure, is not good for me.  My therapist told me a while back that “leaning into projects” was probably a healthy reaction to being depressed and he approved of it – working on projects certainly helps me to not drink anyway.  

I need the energy to push.

Computer:

Today it is two twenty in the afternoon.  I am on another BASEcamp meeting listening to a bald guy in what looks to be his fifties talk about Identity and Access Management.  

This morning I woke up at six twenty, took my antidepressant and stimulants, drank an espresso on top of it, and drove to the Framingham Target to try to get the new Nintendo system – the Switch 2.

I knew I was in good shape pretty much immediately.  There were only ten or fifteen people waiting for the place to open.  I figured they'd get at least twenty five systems and I'd be able to snag something.  So I got my spot in line and waited for twenty minutes in the early morning sun, comfortable and confident.  Struck up a conversation with the woman who got a spot behind me – an overweight nerd who looked to be about my age, closing in on fifty, graying hair, but a happy face somehow.  She was married, had a kid around ten, said she was getting it for her kiddo but she played too.  Zelda, metroid - she knew all of this stuff in a fair amount of detail.  Complained about the motion controls in Skyward Sword and revealed that it was the one Zelda she couldn't finish.  Mentioned that Nintendo never seems to release enough product, and I agreed – they try to keep up artificial demand.  I was glad to talk to her, it made the time pass a little faster.  

And before I knew it, I had it.  We moved inside, two guys in the electronics section manned the register, one dealing out stock, the other ringing people up.  I got the non-mario-kart bundle because I don't care much for that particular game – total 483.   Stopped by Stop and Shop on the way back to grab a few things that Penny wanted:  Salad stuff, fruit, eggs.  Home at seven forty five, woke up my dumb dog, went for a quick walk, then back home.  Played with the doggo while Penny finished getting ready for work. After she left I did the usual:  Smoked a cigarette outside, let our dog mess around on the carpet.  I took a picture of the switch and sent it to my friend Brian, made him jealous.  He may end up getting a Switch after all – he wasn't sure before, but it looks as though I managed to make him jealous enough to go and pick one up.  I set it up, removed drawers from the entertainment console so I could plug things in and do the wiring, put the drawers back, grease stains on my hands from the rails.  The last time I removed these drawers I had a back flare-up that made me pant and sweat, the pain of it.  This time it was difficult but easier than before.  I secured the power cables to the wall behind the drawer and made sure they closed cleanly.  I set up the HDMI interface.  I booted the system and did the initial setup:  Wireless, account login.  I installed Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and then did more account stuff so I could log into the eShop and download the TOTK “Switch 2” expansion / graphics pack.  Presto:  The game now runs at 60fps and looks incredible.  I still have to move over save files because I'm pretty sure I don't want to go through the whole game again.

By the time this was all done it was ten AM and I was able to crate Shelley.  I decided fuck it, let's go into the attic and do ductwork.  I secured the zone 3 output using zip ties and wrapped some fiberglass bat around it for an additional layer of insulation, then wrapped that in plastic from a garbage bag, then did my best to air-seal it all together using HardCast mastic tape.  It had to be a hundred degrees in the attic even though it was morning.  I wore boxers only, my chest bare and glistening from sweat, peeling off sections of tape from the roll, removing the backing, sealing, sealing, sealing.  I drank coke zero because I bought a liter of it – I normally don't drink soda but I wanted to have it included in the picture of me with my switch 2 that I sent to Brian, because Brian's Language of Jealousy is all about indulgence.  He likes Coke Zero, so that's what I bought.  Zone 3 is done.  I moved back to Zone 2 and tried to mastic around it.  I decided to remove the damper entirely  on the route to the register in my office because I couldn't fix it.  I tried to imagine a scenario where I want to heat and cool zone 2 but wanted reduced flow to my office and couldn't really come up with anything.  It might as well get full flow, always.  Who cares.  After sealing the opening with plumber's putty and more mastic, I re-attached the flex duct, zip lined it tight, mastic'ed it to the metal opening.  By this point it was twelve thirty.  I had my work meeting in the background, people talking about identity management, and felt bad that I wasn't paying full attention.  I'm in my office now and I wish I could run the AC here because it's fucking ninety five degrees outside but all the sealant shit I used upstairs needs to cure for a bit before I start everything up in that zone.  Although at these temperatures, I might be able to do it in another hour or so.  Once these work meetings are over I could duck up there and check.  If it's dry and cured, I might just go ahead and turn it on, see what happens.  

Then what I have left is applying the flex-foil to the ductwork where I'd removed the old insulation.  it needs to be airtight around the duct or there could be moisture issues – humid air will produce condensation against the duct if there is any flow at all.  I'll do my best.  I don't know if I have enough flex-foil to do the whole thing.  Then I'll finish wrapping the flex duct that leads to my office.  This will mean more zip lining, some usage of the extra insulation I brought upstairs, maybe another plastic-wrap, like I did with the zone 3 duct.  Probably two more hours of work.  I could do it today but I probably shouldn't – it is going to be an absolute furnace up there.  It would be saner to do it tomorrow morning, let myself relax today.  Maybe go to home depot and buy unfaced insulation bats to bring upstairs to wrap around the rest of the duct.  I'm not totally sure that I'm going to do this yet.  it's a lot of extra work and probably another hundred bucks of material.  But it might also be worth it.  I can feel the coolness of the ducts that only have the foil on them and feel that the extra wrap will help to really keep them tight – a particular concern when I am running this thing constantly, which I will be.  Did I mention it's 95 degrees today?  On June 5th for fucks sake.  Anyone who doesn't think climate change is real can suck my balls.

So the better plan may be to go to home depot and buy a bunch of insulation and prep for tomorrow.  I'm almost done with this fucking project.  I thought I'd be done last week but no.  It just goes on and on.  It's time to finish up.  I'm sick of it.

Computer:  I am doing better today than yesterday.

Waking up without a hangover is important.  Not drinking for four months straight has really cemented this fact for me.  It affects me all day, even with the stimulants I take.  I felt more hopeless than usual, the what's the point of this or that kind of questions that often plague me but are harder to shake off when I'm in this state.  The tension – the internet calls this hangxiety now – will not leave, negative thoughts sticking to me like flies on sticky paper.  Why should I finish sealing the duct in the attic?  Why am I so worried about my stupid dog's happiness and well being?  Why do I have so much difficulty feeling satisfied and happy in my life?

Today things are simpler in my head.  I am listening to presenters on a zoom meeting discuss identity management topics.  They use acronyms like OCLC and AuthZ and SAML.  It is a foreign language unless you work in this space.  It is boring and I find that the discussions are without much of a point.  You sift through hours of bullshit monologuing for a single gem of data – something like “oh it's possible to dynamically reload a service provider in shibboleth.”  Which isn't something I've looked into for years.  And would benefit us on a day to day basis if we could figugure out how to do it and implement it.  I listen to this while cleaning my office.  I am securing plastic retainers to my walls right above the baseboard molding to hide wires in the hope that I will be able to have my dog in this room, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.  

I am thinking about going to Target early in the morning tomorrow to see if they have a Switch 2 to sell me.  It is the release date of the console and I know I want it even though I barely play games now.  I will buy it because I am compelled to buy it, the way I buy all Nintendo systems.  I talk to Penny about it – if I can get one, we will take a picture of me playing it, dressed only in boxer pants but otherwise naked, the game displayed on our big screen TV, candy and nachos scattered around me, a scene of nerd bliss.  She thinks this is a great idea, to take pictures of unadulterated sloth, and send them to my friend Brian, who has a lot of jealousy when it comes to other people living a better life than him.  To him, a better life is an easier life, a lazier life, a life full of entertainment and food and friends and posting and bragging and winning and cheating if the situation requires it.  I don't think he has managed to get a pre-order, which means he won't have a switch 2 and I, theoretically, might.  And in this theoretical world he will become Jelly of me, a fact which justifies almost any cost or inconvenience to myself that I might endure as a result of questing for this product.  Target opens at seven, I can wake up at six thirty, take drugs, and drive down for the seven o'clock open to see what they have. 

I had therapy this morning at nine.  Penny is home today – it's her day off – she has to work on Saturday and when she works on Saturday she gets a weekday off prior.  Her “ADC," whatever that stands for.  Adjusted Day Compensation?  She took care of the dog and I talked to my therapist, whom I think of as Scarecrow because he sort of resembles the actor who plays him in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, for an hour. 

I told him I am doing fine overall.  I revealed that I did jack shit on my vacation – not much vacation-y stuff.  But that it was satisfying to resolve the HVAC issues in our house.  Full disclosure I still have HVAC work to do but probably will not work on it today because it is hot as fuck upstairs and Penny is home and I just kind of feel like it will be a pain to work it all out.  But that being said… maybe.  Maybe I can just silicon the seals and get the flex duct attached to the main outlet and do the initial round of sealing – it will need more than one so it would be helpful for it to do an initial cure today before I lay the second one tomorrow.  That might set me up to complete the project on Friday.  We talked about the IVF status – going to Greece and Albania, better diagnostics, justifying the trip – the time, the energy, the hopelessness.  I talked about the argument I had with Penny last Saturday.  The burden of the dog.  

I did not talk about the drinking on Monday.  He didn't ask if I'd had a drink since the last time we spoke and I didn't bring it up.  I think it's ok – I'm pretty clear on not drinking again, not repeating the mistake.  I have – finally! – come to value the benefits of not being drunk.  Without the hangovers I am able to face things better – my anxiety is a little lower – my energy levels are still shit but better than being hung over.   There are actually days now where I don't nap.  Granted, not many, but they exist.  They used to not exist.  

I also didn't talk about how bored and tired I am of my job.  I have to bear it for Penny, to support our lives together.

I found a reddit thread from a month ago where someone posted about the deletion of my old financial independece blog.  Some people miss it.  More than one person suggested that I put my blog posts into a book.  A few people were a little bit PO'd that it's gone – “a disservice to the internet that it's offline, it is sad."  I wonder if I will tell Penny about it.  It was a big part of my life for a long time.  Part of me wants to respond to the comments, inform people I am alive and well, but I think I will end up refraining.

At any rate, it's still part of the internet archive and people can view the old posts if they really want to.

Computer:  I regret drinking last night of course.

Penny came home and I was half drunk and completely exhausted.  I somehow managed to make dinner – warmed up the baked tilapia that I'd made the day before along with some mac and cheese, the good Panera stuff, and made green beans from scratch with some bacon to give it some kick.  She said she wasn't going to be hungry but when I put it in front of her she scarfed everything down.  So either she was hungry or the food was good.  We put on one of the Hitchcock Hour shows and Shelley fell asleep on Penny's lap.  The Hitchcock stuff is from the 50s and has a slow, campy feel to it that we both like.  Penny tunes out on her phone or her laptop, looking at clothes to buy or new IVF procedures or whatever news and social media her feeds recommend.  I can tune out and work on a coding project or play a video game on my Steam Deck or Switch or whatever.  I can stream pretty much everything to my SteamDeck now via the sunshine and moonlight applications.  

I fell asleep on the couch for half an hour, fried, hearing something on the television in the background.  It could have been anything – I don't remember what Penny put on after the Hitchcock stuff ended.  

I didn't exercise today which is unusual for me but whatever.  I consider it to be a punishment for the drinking.  I was plugging into work for the day.  I'm signed up for this training on identity and access management called BASEcamp.  It's boring as hell but today I was scoping out the structure (basically non-interactive), the people (eighty or so people on each meeting), and the content (most of it not all that applicable to me, but I did learn that many universities are doing SAML proxying to ENTRA because ENTRA supports openID tokens behind the scenes and there are a lot of benefits to that especially for Microsoft heavy shops.)

My dog is barking at nothing, about twenty feet away from me.

I am wondering what I will tell my therapist tomorrow about drinking.  Does it matter that I had a failure?  I don't know.  I'm not drinking tonight and I'm not tempted.  It was a mistake and I want to just let it clear out of my system and go back to feeling steadier during the day.  I was not all that steady today.  

I moved this blog, the lastcaptainslog.com, from my main desktop computer to a small Dell Optiplex Micro, the 3070 model, and made sure the power usage is low.  And it is.  Ridiculously low.  6w idle power running ubuntu with a python server.  The Kill-O-Watt doesn't lie – I plugged the computer into the Kill-O-Watt and picked up real time data.  6 watts is trivial.  It's less than the raspberry pi that I ran this project on when I started it.  Now that it's been moved off my desktop I may go back to this old model I used to have of automatically shutting my windows desktop down at midnight and auto-starting it at 6:30.  It will give it six hours of downtime and over the course of a year that electricity adds up.  Plus I get a freshly booted PC to start the day, never a horrible thing.  

I will make chicken with corn and tomatoes tonight, served with nachoes, for Penny.  We have some ripe avocados that I want to use.

After the meetings were over I smoked a cigarette in the backyard and wondered if my neighbors have figured out that I'm smoking.  Probably.  At least the direct neighbors, Danielle and Adam.  They are around enough and I have been smoking long enough.  I told myself as I smoked that this would be my last pack.  I'll finish it before the week ends and call it quits.  I am barely enjoying it anymore.  I should do something else to relax, to take breaks – go read a chapter of a book, have a cup of tea, get off the screen.  I think that's half of the pleasure of it, getting up, going outside, walking a bit, forcing myself to look at the property, my trees, the grass.  Letting myself think things for a minute, plan the next move.  I don't know.

 I should probably walk Shelley around the block for ten minutes and figure out what I’m going to do next.  Maybe get that Optiplex to auto-start the blog after the system bounces.  Then maybe come up with a list of enhancements.  I was going to add a welcome image and an “about this blog” type page.  That kind of thing.  Because once Penny gets home I really won’t be able to do shit.

Early Tuesday.  I have been up since 6:20A and cannot sleep.  Took drugs:  monafidil, lexapro, caffeine.  Laying on carpet in living room, thinking about life.  

I am hung over but not so bad.  Functional, just hazy and gross.  I feel kind of like death but with a tiny bit of drive somehow.  The drugs do that, give me some drive to power through, no matter how I feel, as my mom might put it, “emotionally.”  Emotionally I feel upset about so many things, and disappointed I didn't get more done in my vacation, and disappointed I can't find better and more sustainable ways to be happy and content besides smoking and drinking and cycling through drugs.

Work today:  Nothing except the BASECamp stuff that runs from noon to five.  I don't really know what I'm in for.  I will probably take most of that shit on my phone if it turns out to be fairly non interactive, which it most likely will be.  I'll set up zoom on my stupid phone and lug it around with me.  Or set it up on my macbook and lug that around with me.   Anything to not be fully plugged into it.

I finally rearranged my office yesterday afternoon.  I didn't even get to talking about it in yesterday's entry because I needed to complain about Penny so badly.  It was one of my goals for the time off – to finally put my home office back together.  It had been in a state of absolute disarray basically since September or October, when we got the dog.  I had moved the desk around to be in a position where I could see Shelley walking around the room – where she couldn't hide from me.  And everything else got moved as a result – the computer, the lamp, the record player stand, my guitars, the printer and end-table that holds it, my speakers and their stands, everything.  Then I worked on a project to Fix My Home Internet and as part of that I moved the small entertainment center piece of furniture out from the wall to access an ethernet jack.  Tools were brought up from the basement, used, and then scattered about the room.  Wires wires wires everywhere, usb this to USB that, male and female ports, thick black cables that carry power, power strips, power extension cables, speaker cables, RCA adaptors, records, dry erase board markers.  I drank a double chai tea and powered through it.  Two hours.   Got things into position mostly.  I'll see how it goes today and if I feel like it's fine, I may attach wires to baseboards, hide them.  Then get fences up, keep shelley from wall.  Then try to put doggo in room, see what happens.  See if it will work, if she can be in the room with me while I work.  We have to do something about our relationship together.  I need to work and don't want to continually care for her all day. 

I don't want to be on high alert, stressed and anxious about her all the time, the way I have been.  One thing about being drunk last night that I truly appreciated was the ability to completely ignore her while I was with her.  We went outside and I let her play while I wrote and I just absolutely did not give a shit about her.

Right before I did the room re-org, I was in the attic, hot, stripped down to my boxers, sweating, looking at the HVAC like I have so many times during my vacation.  Wondering where the problem is, why I don't get good airflow into some of the registers upstairs. 

Finally I made the decision to tear apart the register that I really want working better, the one to my office.  I took a razor and undid the sheath on the ductwork, tough going, cutting through an inch of mastic, some still wet, hands getting dirty.

I cut the flex duct off the main line.  dropped the flex onto the insulation covering the floor.  Looked at the joining metal duct, an O pipe coming off the rectangle of the main rectangular duct.  

And gaped. 

a flat metal damper.  Cutting off airflow to the flex duct traveling to the register in my office.

Explained everything.  I took it out, re-attached flex duct, went into my office.  Strong airflow.  I thought about what I should do.  Do I need to worry about equalizing pressure and shit like that.

I decided no, who gives a fuck.  I will re-attach the flex duct and call it a day.  I have various things to seal and tape together before I can consider this stupid project to be completely over but this explains everything.  I'm upset I didn't catch this earlier.  The hinge to the damper was hidden under plastic from the insulating sheathing over the flex duct and sealed away.  I still should have known better.  Should have looked for it.  I tore apart practically the whole system upstairs looking for the problem and it was in the very last place I could have possibly looked – there was nothing else to tear apart. 

I suppose I should be happy and just let the rest of it go.  I was telling myself that starting the project at the other end resulted in me fixing the electronic dampers which is great for efficiency and comfort.  This way I've redone most of the system and know it's pretty tight.  Not perfect but yes pretty fucking tight.  

It's time to stop wasting time writing and go get the doggo, get ready for work.  I don't want to.  But there's nothing else to do but this. 

I ordered from amazon:  100 more black gloves, a zip tie cutter, and 20 heavy duty zip ties to help fasten shit around the ducts.  Another $50.  I could total what this project has cost me – it will wind up being probably $600.  I think I blew $200 on mastic alone.  Another $100 on aluminum and mastic tape  $30 for a tool I never used but was too embarrassed to bring back to the store because I felt like the employee who checked me out knew that I was buying the wrong thing and I can't face him.  $100 on silicone sealant, $50 on putty, $30 on AC adapters to test motors.  I may spend more on insulating material before it's all over.  

I'm reading the Thursday Murder Club.  There is a character in it, Joyce, who keeps a diary.  She has a line in it.  “I'm writing now, that's what's important.  It is important to focus on the writing.”  She feels that way.  She values it. 

I wonder if I will ever get back to valuing it like that.

Computer:  I've been sober for a hundred and thirty days, give or take a day.

And here, Monday, the last day off of my two weeks of vacation, I have decided to drink.  Penny is still at work and I am outside with our dog Shelley.  Mondays Penny works late at the library.

This would not be a big deal, the sudden drinking, except that I've made it a big deal.  I went through a stretch from about August of 2024 until January 23rd when I was drinking, to use some tired cliches, like a fish.  I drank a bottle of wine by myself almost every night by myself and more or less kept it hidden from Penny, who is clueless about this shit for the most part, because she is self absorbed and not all that aware of what I am doing and how I am most of the time.  She seems to view me as "husband' –  a role rather than a person.  It has something to do with her Greek upbringing.

It took until today, the last day of my precious days off, for me to realize I would have a problem.  I was smoking a cigarette behind the shed and wanted a drink badly.  Penny had left for work and Shelley was crated and I thought to myself that this would be a perfect day to be drunk all day.

So here I am, in my backyard, surrounded by temporary black metal fencing that I bought online somewhere, my dog nosing around in the grass, half drunk already from a glass and a half, realizing I am probably going to go inside and drink more, even though it will make my day tomorrow harder, even though it will put me back on track to be drunk again, a drunk just like my father was for a time, the time when he was with my mother, before they got divorced and before he met Martha, who became his wife.  Martha would not tolerate my Dad's drinking.   A drink or two here and there, no day long binges, none of that shit, no indeed.

Maybe I won't drink tomorrow.  This is my hope.  That I can just sort of enjoy the evening of being kind of drunk and letting my dog do whatever it is that she feels like doing and not feeling obligated to entertain her or tire her out or anything.  

I wanted to talk honestly about how my life is going and how my vacation went.  I have therapy on Wednesday and he is going to want to have a summary.  How did I do?  Did I have any fun?

I don't know.  Being with Penny is a constant strain.  I was with Penny a lot.  She tires me out.  She wants to sit on the couch and watch movies and television shows, which I often like but also makes me feel tired and useless.  She constantly talks about her mother and her job and people, people, people.  I wish she had a hobby, I wish we could talk about other things, but we don't know how.  I love her but when I am actually with her I often just feel bad about everything – her, me, our lives.  She is incredibly angry at the world because her father died last year and her mother has Alzheimers and she has to do a lot of coordinating and care and it's very difficult for her to handle.  I find that much of my time is spent supporting her.  

Take Saturday, for instance.  

Interruption:  My dog is digging in the dirt.  I didn't think she was much of a digger but here we are.  Her paws are covered in black and I am probably going to have to clean her up at some point.  This is the life of a dog owner.  Messes and barking and training and care.  I am amazed I am dealing with it as well as I am but I often resent the stupid thing for needing so much.  

Saturday Penny had to go and take care of her mother and the whole thing spiraled.  She drove thirty minutes to her mom's place and talked to the caregiver and did some chores for her – took her to two banks because the caregiver needed to do a wire transfer to Haiti, her home country, and the first bank wouldn't do it.  Then she interviewed a new caregiver, someone to do the dirty work of feeding and clothing and staying up half the night tending to the evening psychosis of the mid-stage alzzies sufferer – and came home in a terrible, foul mood.

I should add that before she left for her mother's place that I decided that it would be a good idea to tell her that if we do manage to have a child together – we are doing IVF in an attempt to have a late in life baby – I fully expected her to abandon us to go and care for her mother.  you will do it, I said.  you will leave me with the baby and go care for your mom, the same way you are leaving me and Shelley right now to go and do stuff for your mom.  You will do it because you feel like you have no other choice.  And because I am available to help you make these bad decisions.

I hate it all.  Alzheimers, Penny, my stupid dog, my stupid life.  I'm forty eight and you would think and hope that I would be past this kind of shit.  More mature somehow, serene.  Like I should just agree to everything.  Let's go to Greece and Albania for IVF because the doctors here are no good.  Let's do a lot of bullshit with no scientific merit. 

I make so many excuses for her, you know.  

I listen to my next door neighbor Yuri clean the deck.  She was power washing it just a few minutes ago but now she is sweeping.  Shelley had been barking at her but now that has stopped.  Shelley is instead chewing on bits of mulch because she finds it to be rewarding.   A girl I met at the dog park today said that her two dogs went through a phase where they chewed on wood chips too.  It stopped after two or three months.  We'll see if the same holds true for Shelley.

So Penny comes back in a bad mood and feels like I don't support her and I don't understand and nobody understands and I have to reassure her that I love her and that I see what she is going through and it doesn't matter.  She makes a comment that she doesn't want to stay home all day – a comment I read as something some entitled bitch might say.  A comment with a dig:   You don't take me out.  A comment with subtext:  You don't treat me right.  

These sorts of things make me feel as though I have married the wrong person.  And of course I knew that we are not the same person and we have different expectations but I often feel as though her expectation is that I make her happy always and solve her problems always and so on.

The rest of the day was a trial.  By the way I drank the rest of the bottle of wine already.  Three quarters down the fucking hatch just like that, under an hour, and after the initial twenty minutes of euphoria I am already sagging.  I feel like drinking more but I won't because Penny will be home before I know it and whatever I will just try to slog through the night and see how I feel tomorrow.  I don't want to be sloppy drunk when she gets home in an hour.  

I took Penny out.  We went shopping – initially to Wallgreens because I needed dental wax to help ease the discomfort of a temporary appliance I had put in on Friday morning to help hopefully improve the TMJ in my jaw.  Then she said I thought we were going to Target and I said well we could go to Target, there are some things I want and need there so we did that, I bought stuff for smoothies, frozen peaches and passion fruit, and we left.  We went to Fresh Market and got peanut butter and chicken salad and gellato.  I was bored and tired and wanted to go home.  I pretended i was fine and happy.  I am rarely fine and happy.  I don't know how to be that way.  Sober or drunk, nothing changes,.  I am task oriented and miserable most of the time.  Straining to fit into Penny's world.  

If you read the previous entry you will be happy to know the rabbits didn't eat the lettuce, by the way.  The lettuce poisoned with antifreeze.  They avoided it.  They are continuing to tear up my lawn, dig holes, breed more of themselves. 

I am supposed to be okay with this because:  Nature.

After shopping we get home and watch a hitchcock movie and I fall asleep and then I wake up and get the dog and we walk and I make dinner because I guess I am in the doghouse because of the comment I made that morning about Penny probably leaving me to care for her mom even if we had a kid together.

Nothing helps, nothing matters, Penny hates everything.  At one point Penny is in the kitchen doing something, cleaning maybe, which she does rarely, less than me, and she is monologuing, talking about the usual things.  I think this time it is her friend Christine, and she is bitching about how Christine thinks that she (Penny) has all the time in the world because she (Christine) is single and childless and bored and has a lot of free time.  I am barely saying anything.  Not really responding.  A lot of mmhmm.  Yeppers.  I have a dental appliance in my mouth from yesterday's TMJ procedure and it hurts to talk and the pastic retaining bands are irritating my gums.  I am trying to play a game on my nintendo switch, the zelda game, breath of the wild.  She suddenly pivots the conversation, if you can call it that, to my mother.  Says my mother will get sick someday and soon i'll understand.  That everyone will understand. 

I hate when she is like this.  being a man, I think about what caused this behavior.  Was it something I did?  Was it because we made love that morning so she felt too secure in our relationship?  Secure enough to start ripping on my mom and telling me that I will soon be as miserable as she is?  I tell her enough.  Not in those words.  Ok, Ok, Penny.  I got it, I got it.  That is my nonconfrontational way of saying I have heard enough chirping about shit.

She is just… lost in herself and her thought patterns.  How is this person doing, and that person, and this celebrity, and that celebrity.  When Rick Moranis got punched in New York a couple of years ago she treated it as though it were a personal offence.  

It baffles me.

She pretends she is a housewife and I need to do my duties as a husband to make evertyhing OK and whatever she does is fine because she is a woman.

Ok.  OK OK OK enough of this fuckery.  I've had another glass of wine.  But not a glass, just wine chugged out of a bottle I shouldn't be drinking, the bottle Penny bought last weekend that made me apprehensive about her going at it because I remembered when she had three drinks in quick succession a year ago at the Rodgers family farm and went fucking bananas angry about everything.  

I am going to still be unsteady when she gets home, most likely.

All of this talk and still I have not summarized my glorious two weeks off.  Instead I just complain and document domestic bullshit.

My two weeks off was not what I wanted.  A lot of dog care, a lot of HVAC work and troubleshooting – shit nobody cares about but me.  I ripped apart the fiberglass sheathing on the last zone today in the attic.  I found that two of the registers had fucking metal dampers in them.  That's the whole reason the system wasn't working the way I expected it to.  Three years in this house and it took until today for me to figure out why two of the upstairs rooms were not heating and cooling the way I expected.  I'd basically already torn the rest of the system upstairs apart and rebuilt it.  This as the final thing.  And probably the biggest thing.

It makes me crazy.

I can't believe I have to start working again tomorrow.  I dread it.  Even though my time off was not fantastic, it was something different.

Computer:  Today I will talk about the tyranny of the dog.

The dog rules my life.  The dog and Penny of course but I am here today to talk about the dog.

Our dog's name is Shelley, a ten month old King Charles Cavalier spaniel.  She's cute and more or less well behaved.  There are sometimes health or behavioral issues that occupy my complete attention:  barking for no reason (how do I train this out of her?) or unusual amounts of drool that might indicate an oral problem or lumps in the poo or failure to poo and so on.

But that's not the biggest problem either.  

The biggest problem is the constancy of the care.

I know that this is a common complaint amongst mothers, too.  You are never off.  You are constantly monitoring them, teaching them, worrying about them.

Well, I have this complaint about the dog.

I have to wake her up in a few minutes to do what I think of as a ‘cycle.’  She is crate trained which means that when we are not cycling – when she is not up and around me – she is in the crate, napping.  Since she is older now at ten months, her cycles are, minimally, an hour and a half.  Less than that and it's hard for her to settle in the crate.  So I find that I am scrambling to live my real adult life – exercise, work, house-care, even some of the care of Penny – in the off time – meaning, the time that Shelley is in the crate.

Which means that I am always scrambling to get things done.  And worrying about having consistent energy – enough energy to get all the things I need to get done every day.

I thought it would be better by now – and although it is in some ways – it's also still a terrific daily burden and wears me out.

I don't want to wake her up and do another cycle but I will.  It will go like this: 

Wake her the fuck up, give her something to drink, get her harness and lead on her, walk her outside for fifteen minutes.

Then we will be back inside.  I want to work out – I think I might have the energy to do this, even though I've been busy already today.  I think I might be able to do my shoulder and bicep routine in the basement.

But will I have energy after the walk?

I will have to bring Shelley down into the basement with me.  Will she behave?  Will she be distracted enough to sit with me for an hour while I slog through it?  Or will she start whining and god forbid barking?

I wish sometimes that she didn't exist.  The amount of care that she needs is ridiculous.  I wonder what other people do to transition to the next phase – the phase where they don't give a shit about their dog, the phase where the dog just kind of sits around and does nothing.  I would like to do whatever is necessary to hasten it.

--

In other news I bought things I should not have bought today:  Antifreeze, lettuce, a home depot bucket.  Our yard is absolutely overrun with rabbits and they are digging holes everywhere.  I have tried letting Shelley pee and poop everywhere (the scent of the dog is supposed to make them think twice about setting up shop in the area) and I have tried sticking cigarette butts into their main warren hole because they don't like the smell of ashes and fire and I have tried putting bars of soap into little decorative and water permeable bags and leaving them in areas where they nest.  I have tried cinnamon powder and chili powder soaked in water and I have tried putting up an owl on the top of the shed that looks like it's waiting for a moment to strike and have a snack.

I am horrified to say I am about to try killing them with lettuce soaked in antifreeze.  This is probably illegal.  It is certainly unethical.  It fails basic principals of “do no harm.”  But the rabbits are messing up my property, my porch, my house.

I have become a terrible person.

Computer:  Please forgive me.

Computer: 

Today I faced my greatest domestic challenge:

My sister, my mother, my wife, and my dog, all in the same day.  

Today will be difficult as well but at least I will not see my mother.  She came over with my sister after their day out together.  Insisted, even though I told my sister that I didn't want to have dinner with my mom.  My sister spoke to my mom, tried to make the conversation lean away from coming over, and failed.  Mom wanted to see me.

Penny, my wife, has a phrase she likes to use about needy people.  So and so “Needs attention.”  Or “needs attenciones.”  She uses it so often I get sick of it.  And it isn't a particularly nuanced comment.  My mom needs a lot of things other than attention.

But when you get to the bottom of everything, Penny's assessment is probably mostly true.  Although there's other stuff going on – depression, meds, physical issues  and so on, a little of column A and a little of column b is another favorite phrase of Penny – the need for attention and validation is probably the most powerful driving force on days when she actually has some energy.

I don't know how other people deal with all of this domestic shit without losing their mind.  All I want to do is work on my HVAC issue so I can put it behind me.  Today I will see if any of the mastic sealing I did yesterday helped at all.  I will toss a lot of the refuse into a trash bag and remove it from the attic to give me better working space.   I will see if the sealed damper that I made in the basement yesterday works any better than the non-sealed sort.   I will try to close gaps and whatever.  I will spend hours on it.

I had thoughts about the story I had been working on.  Patterns.  Maybe i will pick it up again.  i had new ideas and fantasies about weaving them together.  The main character's wife is a phone scroller.  Their baby is an IVF baby., donor egg.  Unbenownst to the characters, this egg could have been .. from the guy who owned the condo.  His family line.  Who is also the family line of the woman buried under the condo.

I thought about other horror movies and how they are created.  Swirling thoughts, half asleep.  You meet new characters and you say things like :oh they are going to die."  

I will never write this story but it is interesting to think about.

Yesterday after my sister left at 11, I crated Shelley and tried to work upstairs. 

It was slow going.  I did about two and a half hours of work and half an hour of cleanup.  Mastic clung to me everywhere, arms, hands, feet.

Penny texting me from the bathroom where she is getting ready.  There is no peace anymore.  There is never peace, there is texting from penny, my sister, my mom, there is work in the background, there is the dog, always the needs of the dog and how to manage her.  I cannot go away, cannot retreat, there is no about face and run option, there is just engagement engagement engagement