Clear

After weeks of tension, the wait is over. Finally—while I was cooking a cheeseburger at work—my mortgage broker emailed me to inform me that it was finally finished. We are clear to close.

For a month, all of my nerves had been pushed to the limits while waiting for the bank to decide if they were going to lend me—an ex-con—$140,000. They pulled apart my credit, my tax history, and my job history. They asked some really good questions like, “Where are all of your tax records?” And, “Where is all of your income from 2103-2015?” And I was all like, “Bwahahaha. I really like your tie!” No, I never said a word to these people, and I never saw them, that’s what a mortgage broker is for. He fielded all of the tough questions for me, and made everything except gathering all of the documents easy.

Seeing those three little magical words—clear to close—was truly dreamlike. It meant that there was no longer a possibility that the former me could impact this grand decision.

Now there are a whole new set of challenges, but they are all surmountable. I looked at the pictures from the appraisal and saw a few projects that we need to work on to make things look nice inside, and I have no clue how to do any of them. In fact, when it comes to building, repairing, or maintaining anything in and around a home, I am a virgin. So I will bring my hammer and screws and pound away until I figure it out. That’s not exactly true, but I am starting from scratch and own no tools or knowledge on how to do something like install carpet, put up drywall (or sheetrock. Or are those the same thing?), or plumb pipes. I will be using YouTube a lot for information, and I am hoping that Amanda and I have enough friends to collectively fix all of our minor problems.

First things first, get the basement carpeted. After the inspection, I had the owners pull up all of the tiles in the basement that were cracked. Well, that left a rather unattractive pattern on the floor, and it looks much worse than when we first saw it.

 The basement is the room that has the most potential, so I’m not in a hurry to fix the aesthetics. I want us to have a vision of what we want it to look like before we do anything too drastic. But for now, maybe some cheap carpet will do the trick.

And then there’s the bathroom. The tile looks like something that a discount morgue passed on in 1970. The bathtub itself is a homemade walk-in and as far as I can tell, it simply needs to be replaced.

And then there’s the wallpaper. The days following the closing this coming Friday, and every Monday remaining in the month of May, will be dedicated to wallpaper removal and painting. I am enlisting anybody with arms, or knowledge on how to best remove the tacky stuff. Pun intended.

There are a few minor issues that can be easily fixed with a little elbow grease and some cash. The boiler and furnace should probably be serviced, and the condenser for the central air will need to be replaced in a few years. Like I said before, these are all manageable, and with money going into savings for this type of stuff, we have nothing to worry about.

The bottom line is, we are moving into a place we can call our own. We are building equity. We are building our lives.

If I was able to make this happen, so can you; no mistake big or small cannot be overcome. None of this would have been possible had I not been diligent about a few things after my release, namely working on my problems that made me need to self-destruct.

For the first time in… ever, I am proud of myself and all of my accomplishments. So maybe it’s okay to show off a little of what I’ve earned as a result of working the twelve steps with a sponsor. I like to keep this blog related to recovery, and surely the positive consequence is worth sharing.

This is where I was nearly four years ago. I worked on myself inside and out, and I became a better man. I didn’t just quit using drugs and alcohol, I found the roots of my problems and dragged them out and talked about them until they started to dissipate. I work with other alcoholics to help them find their roots as well and in turn that helps me remember where I was. I work with a sponsor who is so knowledgeable about life and the program that I can ask him for help anytime and he has the answer to get my head straight again. I take time out of every week to go to meetings where I network with people like me and we discuss solutions to our common problems.

And this is where I am now:

This is where I will be. This is where I will spend my foreseeable future with the ones I love. This is home.

Lunch in the Park

Today I realized that I still have no idea what I’m doing in the role of a parent. I know, I am not a parent, but I play one on TV. Fine, that's not true.

Intermittently, I will have the opportunity to spend an entire day with the girls. Today Amanda works a double and she left early this morning and my day began. I fed them, dressed them, changed diapers wherever necessary, and even gathered the contents of something called a “diaper bag” which must always contain so much more than just diapers which is so deceiving it’s not even fair. They should call it a diaper wipe juice pouch Shopkins snack blanky Kleenex banana bag. That would be more informative and accurate. Anyhow, I packed that bag and we left Delano for the big city.

The big city is what the oldest girl calls anything east of Delano. She’s pretty spot-on, but this time we headed for Minneapolis to have lunch with my mom at Theodore Wirth Regional Park and playground. When we arrived the girls both saw the latter of the aforementioned depiction and pulled me toward the swings as fast as they could. We swung, we twirled, and we climbed. Well, we didn’t, but they did.

After a while my mom snagged a picnic table and setup for a nice afternoon meal. She brought cheese, potato salad, tomatoes, a pineapple, pickles, bread, and mustard. Pickles were a hit with the girls, as was the pineapple. I had a talk the day before with Ella about being polite when being offered food that she knows she will not like. That conversation was well received at the time, but it all went out the window when potato salad was introduced to her plate. I tried to remind her of that discussion, but she remained phased. This is when I become conscious that I have had enormous difficulty communicating with these children, especially the oldest. I think and act logically, or as I see logic in a situation or thought. Children do not think logically, they don’t get that I do, and that most of what I say to them is probably received as incomprehensible because it goes against what they think would be a more fun alternative. What the hell am I going on about?

I read somewhere recently that kids need to spend most of their time just being kids. When they are playing, they are learning. I get that, and I need to incorporate some more of that style in with my rigid, hardline approach to certain areas of their lives like… eating. My mom pointed out today that no matter what they eat, they keep growing and they don’t starve. That makes way more sense than telling them they can’t leave the table until they eat their vegetables, or threatening to take away toys if they don’t “listen better.”

I’m not saying I’m mean: we have a ton of fun and I get hugs all day and there is a general feel of happiness throughout this household. I’m saying that I’m learning how to be a parent and I’m not getting everything right. I need to be okay with imperfectionism. I devised that term just now and it means this: I know that I will not always do everything perfectly, or even above average, and I should be okay with it and expect the same from others. This applies especially to children.

After lunch we went for a nice walk through the thawing woods where I contemplated my new theory on parenting. And when we eventually left the park after another hour on the jungle gyms, even though neither of the girls ate much for lunch, I took them out for ice cream. Not as a reward, not because I was making up something to them, but because I love them, and I want to see them happy. Maybe I'm not so bad after all.





Still Learning

Normally as I’m driving myself to the coffee shop to write my posts, I have a good idea of what I’m going to write. This morning as I was brushing off my car—again—my phone started ringing. I hopped in and opened up my ear piece so I could start navigating over the slippery streets. The voice on the other end was that of my mortgage broker, and he had some exciting news.

He told me that the process necessary for acquiring a Federal loan for U.S.D.A. rural development entailed a lengthy background check that looked for old government debt, and my ten-year-old student loans came up with a balance of roughly $26,000. My loan would not be approved, stated the underwriter.

My mortgage broker—I’ll call him Roy from now on—since the beginning has been a motivator, and a shining light in an else ambiguous practice of home buying of which I have no understanding. His motto has been, “There’s always a way.” In this case, my new way is a conventional loan with a small percentage down, and an extra .25% interest. That’s a lot of money over 30 years, but it’s in the plans to pay more toward the principle every month, so hopefully it doesn’t have a crippling effect on finances over the years. Mortgage insurance will still be a factor for the first few years, as it was with the U.S.D.A loan, so nothing changes there.

 

Fifteen years ago I had moved back to Minnesota from a half-way-house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. I was young, and I needed direction, and I followed the advice of a commercial I saw on the television for National American University. They said I could go to school full-time, just one day per week. And I did, for a while. I took out loans, and I earned some credits. When I moved to Rochester, I transferred to R.C.T.C. and I found out I could take out more money in loans than I needed for tuition. Years, later, after maxing out my loans every semester for extra cash, I started using meth and I would take out tuition plus the max, then withdraw from the classes before the deadline, and they would refund me the money. It was a perfect plan, because I had no plans on living long enough to pay all of that debt.

It was a slipup that lasted many years and involved a lot of paperwork that told me I would always be liable, and sometimes our blunders continue to bite us even when we are far away from the occasion and doing good things with our lives. I owe $26,000 to the Fed and at some point, because of step nine, I will have to make good on that money. I don’t know why they haven’t come after me for so many years, or why it says on my credit report that they all have a zero balance, but I do know that they will not be forgiven, and they will collect. I just don’t know how or when.

The last thing Roy said to me on the phone was that I shouldn’t lose any sleep over this minor setback, and that it probably wasn’t even a setback. Things will proceed normally, and I can just sit back and wait. But that will not happen. I might worry a bit, and I might dig up a bit more of my past myself to see if I can conjure up any other old reasons or debts that could hinder us from getting this house we love.

I wrote this post in the singular until that last sentence because this happens to be about me and my past, but it also affects my girlfriend and the two girls. All of my past mistakes can have current significances; it’s how I’m able to deal with them that sets me apart from Vince Jr. That’s my new nickname for the younger Vince that still had a lot of learning to do: an education if you will funded wholly by the Federal Government.

Not 17

Are we sick of this winter yet? Lord knows I am. It’s been a long day that included 70 miles of driving through irregular frenzied accumulations of a blizzard that is here about a month or two late. When I finally got home from work, it had been over three hours since I clocked out, and I got stuck about thirty feet from my driveway for a good 45 minutes.  It’s all over now, and I am warm and safe inside.

The scariest part was driving with the girls for the last 45-minute leg of the trip. Now, I was well aware of my surroundings, and had their safety first in mind, but the drifts don’t care about their well-being. I topped out at about 45mph as we wound through the back roads of Wright County. They both fell asleep within minutes of getting in the car, and they stayed asleep when I opened my door at a stop several times to bang the ice off of the wipers. I got stuck for about five minutes half way home from Monticello, but I was able to get out and on my way unassisted. Done.

This post is not about this life, it’s about a former version of me from seventeen years and one-day-ago. It was April 14^th, 2001. I was a skeleton and I had been on a bender for weeks but I had made one good decision in leaving my mom a note asking for help. I told her of my troubles, and we agreed that I would go to Hazelden Center for Youths and Families the following day. It would be the first time I applied myself in a treatment setting, but my fourth treatment so far.

My mom made me stay in a hotel the night before I went in because she did not trust me in her home. She had learned. When she dropped me off, she said she would be back in the morning to bring me in, and that I should get some rest before I walked into the unknown. Here’s what I actually did.

I had $10 that I had stolen from a man sleeping on a couch in a house in which I had stayed up all night doing drugs and drinking. I had spent over an hour trying to get his wallet out of his pocket while he snored away and nearly shrieked when it finally fell out. To my frustration, all that was inside was the ungenerous $10. No addict can achieve the high of their dreams for that little, so I left and eventually made the decision to stop at my mom’s and write the note with a piece of paper and pencil I found near her mailbox.

The hotel had a bar connected to it. That doesn’t actually matter; I just wanted you to know. Even in 2001, a stiff drink was $5 and tipping has always been part of my moral code, even though I often tipped with drug or stolen money. So I decided that I could get a drink and a beer, tip $1.25, and possibly come up with some sort of situation or lie that would harvest compassion from a bartender or fellow patron, thus securing me at least one more drink. The “forgot my wallet” trick wouldn’t work because I would surely get I.D.’d and I would naturally have that in my wallet. Then I thought of charging a blackout to my room, but I felt guilty about making my mom pay for another bender. And then I decided I would just start a tab and walk out after a few rounds.

I walked into the bar and sat down. She informed me that drinks were $3 for hotel guests, and I had to give her my key to get the deal, so I did. The worst possible thing for an addict to do is to start a drunk they can’t finish. I had to leave the bar that night with barely a buzz, and I stayed up all night thinking up ways to go steal or con the rest of the alcohol. I was a miserable wreck when I finally woke up after a couple fitful hours of sleep. And for the first few weeks in treatment I obsessed over that last night and wished I had done it better.

When I sat in jail after getting arrested for my meth charge over four years ago, I fixated on the night in the hotel room and what I should have done differently. When I was released on bail, I spent six months doing everything I possibly could to make sure I wouldn’t have any regrets when I went to prison. Every minute I was high and trying to make money illegally. I think that was one big difference in this round: I think that I got it all out of my system, and I no longer obsess or think too much about the fun parts of addiction. When I think about liquor now, or twirling the meth pipe, I get queasy and nervous, so I quickly change my thoughts. It doesn’t happen often, and I have plenty of tools in my belt to combat these random memories when they occur.

 

If I had stayed sober after that night, tomorrow I would have 17 years of sobriety. I did not. I made a series of catastrophic mistakes that lead to nine years of drinking and drugging after nearly five years of sobriety. I still maintain that I have no regrets. I am grateful for all of my experiences both good and bad, because the combination of every event in my life has leaded me to this moment and who I have become.

This moment I have three years, nine months, nineteen days, six hours, and ten minutes of sobriety, and one hell of a story.

 

 

Selfish

I’ve been focusing on myself too much I think. I’ve been writing on my involvement with the home buying process, and not taking inventory of myself and focusing on the still suffering alcoholic and newcomer to the program as I should be on a constant basis. This means that I am always supposed to be on the lookout for things like selfishness, self-centeredness, resentment, and dishonesty, among other things, and when they come up, I need to address them and resolutely turn my thoughts toward somebody that needs my help. I know I’ve been selfish because I’ve been irritable at the things that normally make me happy: that’s a pretty big sign.

It’s okay to be selfish on a certain level: it gets me through the day. Like I can take time to shower, eat, sleep, and do the things that come naturally to humans like poop, fornicate, and breathe. But I can’t spend all of my time thinking about and worrying about all of the paperwork, financing, and the physical act of owning a home without spending an equal amount of time understanding how I was even able to get to this level of achievement.

None of this is possible without the hands-on work I do in my 12-step program, so I’ve tried to spend a fair amount of time this week finding more local meetings, and eventually, a meeting that I can attend regularly in Silver Lake. I have one sponsee in the program currently, but I am moving farther away than I already am so I will leave it in his hands how he wants to proceed. My sponsor is fine with us meeting once a month in the cities, and talking on the phone once per week and if anything urgent arises. When I find my footing in my new city, I can start to build a new foundation and network with other sober minds far away from my home group in St. Paul. I will still get there every now and then, but not often.

 

I’ve been working a little bit on step-11 which is about prayer and meditation. This isn’t new territory for me, but it’s really the first time I’ve given it an honest try. It’s based on the fact that I already have some understanding of a God of my choosing, which I do. Unfortunately, the God of my choosing is the group conscience in the meetings I attend, so it’s a little difficult to focus my prayers on something that doesn’t exist in my car at 5:20am when I’m driving to work, but I try anyhow, and I still call it God. I pray that I find the ability throughout the day to show love and tolerance to everybody I encounter. I pray that I am relieved of the desire to drink or get high for one more day. I pray for the knowledge of when to keep my mouth shut, and I pray that I act as part of the solution, not the problem. Sometimes I get a little more specific if there is some underlying fear or resentment, and always I ask for the liberation from the bondage of self, as it has been so disparaging in my past. I do all of this in about one minute, and then I turn MPR back on for the morning news.

Lately, I’ve been forgetting to do my little prayers, and I can tell during the day that I started without them. Maybe it’s just a subconscious thing: maybe it helps me remember to be nice throughout the day when I say these things in the morning. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence, but I know that it works when I do it, so I need to keep doing it. This will make me a better person, a better role-model, and a better friend, and none of those things are selfish.

 I have two little girls that look up to me and those are the two most important things in my life, and it’s easy to overlook them (because they are short) when I’m fielding correspondence  from mortgage brokers, title companies, utilities, real estate agents, and more. It’s easy to tell them “later” when they want to play, because I have to find an old document or file taxes from 2016 as fast as possible because I’m a moron and didn’t want to pay but now I did and the stressful day is over and I have all documents in and I just want to relax but I have to cook dinner and clean up after them and bathe them and read them stories and get them to bed and it just never ends. It would be easy to say, “Somebody else should be doing this. Somebody else should be paying for their lives. Somebody else should be contributing SOMETHING to their lives other than their mom and me.” But I don’t, because as adults, we provide what the children need.

The children have all they need. We have everything we need, and even a little of what we want. I’m not just complacent, I’m happy. I’m free. I want more of this life. Now that’s selfish.

Inspected

There are so many working pieces. Even at work, I am bombarded all day with inquiries from my mortgage broker and real estate agent. These people are thorough, and there’s a lot to discuss.

On Thursday, we drove out to Silver Lake for the home inspection. If you’ve never gone through that process, it’s probably the scariest part of this whole system so far. The inspector crawls on, in, and around every inch of the property, looking for anything that is wrong with plumbing, electrical, foundation, and other words I forgot. I knew this was going to happen because they covered it in great deal at the first time homebuyer’s workshop I attended about a month ago, so I went in prepared for the worst case. That wasn’t necessary.

As expected with any seventy-year-old house, there are some minor cracks and flaws. There are some repairs that were done improperly, and there is some work to be done with sheetrock and insulation for comfort, and a carbon monoxide detector needs to be installed for safety. There is a minor leak coming from the waste pipe in the basement and the furnace works properly but needs to be serviced. There is a portion of the patio out back that is sagging a little and pulling away from the wall, and the windows should have wells dug in front of them to avoid water leaking through. There are some very minor issues with outlet covers, and the radon test is pending. But really nothing is impossible, and all of it I have already put in a request to be repaired or replaced by the sellers.

Now, that doesn’t mean that they will repair and replace everything I want them to, but they will likely take some of the list on before we agree to the purchase.

While we were in the house again, we decided to take a few more pictures which I will now share with all of you and end this post because I need to read books to the kids before bedtime.

This here's a big-ass stove.

This is the view of the front door from the living room.

The kitchen from the living room, doors open.

Doors closed.

Probably one of the first things I will do as a homeowner is remove this bar which intrudes on the person sitting down.

This. This is the biggest problem in my eyes. They made a homemade walk-in shower out of a perfectly good bathtub. It will have to be replaced before we can bathe the girls.

That wallpaper is everywhere.

The main upstairs hallway leading to all four bedrooms.

Amanda showing off our favorite, and only wallpaper we will be keeping in the house.

Here's the leak from the waste pipe.

A cool kitchen cabinet surrounded by deadly wallpaper.

After a long day of driving and technical jargon, we settled in for the Twins home opener.

Look closely, not only is the bullpen pitcher's name Vincent, he looks like me.


 

 

 

I Peed on my Foot

I woke up at 6:30 this morning, as I do most Mondays. Groggily, I tiptoed around a regular bedpost, and a much more menacing, testicle-smashing bedpost that crunches me between itself and a dresser. This is how I get out of bed; I do this every morning, not just on Mondays. Normally it’s at 5am.

I escape the dark chamber with little bruising and head for the bathroom. I get up fifteen minutes earlier than I need to be up to get the girls ready, so I can do my business in the bathroom. I mean poop and pee just to be clear. I should mention here that I was tossing and turning all night with an upper back strain that is quite painful, and I wasn’t fully aware of everything going on at the moment because I was being cautious of how I was sitting so as not to exacerbate the situation.

After two minutes of sitting on the toilet I realized that my right foot had been sitting in a rather large puddle of water and I became annoyed because it hadn’t gotten cleaned up from the bath the night before. I was annoyed at myself, because I would have been the one responsible for cleaning up after the girls bathing. I was quickly relieved when I looked down to find that the puddle was actually a lagoon of my own urine that had leaked between the seat and bowl because of the awkward way I had sat down. I peed on my foot. Fortunately, I was wearing a sock so it soaked it up and into all the crevices created by my toes.

I grabbed a towel and cleaned up the mess, and it was time to get the girls ready. I try to do this by myself on Mondays, because Amanda does most of the work in the mornings when it comes to the girls and I like to let her sleep in. Sometimes, but not always, I try to do their hair. Today was not a hair day, as she was up and helped with that.

We had big plans today. We need to do all sorts of stuff to get ready to move in two months. Most of it is for the girls, and today our goal was to find a new daycare in our new town. First, we checked the internet. We found that there are eight in-home daycare businesses in Silver Lake. We looked for reviews, we made some calls, and we scheduled an interview with one of the two that answered their phones this day after Easter Sunday.

We sat down with a lady and asked questions. She had great answers for everything we wanted to know. We toured her house, and loved what we saw. This is as specific as I’m going to get for technical reasons, but we called her later and said we were going with her. She seemed just as excited as we were, and that’s a whole separate process with many moving parts, but it’s progress. I’ll just say this: everything clicked. I’m as happy with this daycare provider as I am with the house. I don’t believe anything could be better.

We went shopping in Hutchinson and got a feel for the town. It has everything we need and is only nine miles away.

We went back to Silver Lake to the post office because we didn’t see a mailbox anywhere around our property. We found out that we have to get a P.O. box, which is really no big deal. We asked for a cool number and then said it would be cool if our number matched our address: 217. It was available! It’s the little things, folks.

This is all for tonight, here are some more pictures:

A view from inside the breezeway.

Technically, this is our front door, although it is on the side of the house.

We just needed a picture to show how cute out little P.O. box is.

This is our front door, and entrance to the breezeway which leads to the house, garage, and backyard. If it looks like there's paint chipping, it's just the snow. The cement looks dirty; it's just dirt. And maybe we could have flipped the doormat to a flatter position, but it was cold and windy. I love how you can see through the breezeway to the backyard.