Remember a Day

Today is Memorial Day. I usually find out every year at the same time that this isn’t Labor Day, and the same thing happens on Labor Day when I’m told it isn’t Memorial Day. I don’t know too many people who have served our country with a weapon, but hey, thanks if you did. I hope you accomplished something.

Me, I served my employer today for the first busy morning/afternoon of the season (that I’ve worked.) I could have used a gun. I’m only kidding, I promise. I would never kill people for ordering food, even in heavy volume. I actually rather enjoyed the busy rush, and it was a good time to iron out all of the potential wrinkles on the line before this level of business becomes the standard.

Here in Minnesota, temperatures soared into the high 90s, and even touched 100 in spots. I am fortunate to work in one of the very few kitchens in existence with functional air conditioning. Even though I work next to equipment on my part of the line that reaches temperatures around 350°, I am able to utilize my skillset without dripping sweat or fearing heat exhaustion.

I recall a time about a year before I went to prison when I worked the outdoor grill station at a restaurant down in southeast Minnesota. I was positioned next to two gas grills that temped out at about 600° and I was exposed to the humid, stagnant, mosquito-infested air that floated up from the slow moving Root River. I was constantly high on meth back then, and my uniform included a heavy black chef’s coat that was unforgiving at best. Sweat poured steadily from my shaky brow as I danced and twirled about wasting nearly every move in a confusing tornado of spatulas, tongs, and overcooked meat.  By the end of that summer I had wasted away and was unable to see properly because I had lost all of my contact lenses and had no glasses. I was useless as a cook and questionable as a person. They only kept me on because they needed bodies. Bodies are an important, if not occasionally useless implement in every professional kitchen. If I were in that condition now in this current employ, I would be banished to some redundant location.

But I am not. This summer, like my coworkers, I will get kicked down all day long and keep going back for more because we are the few that are capable. Unless you already do this for a living, you shouldn’t try to get into this industry. You probably can’t do this.

I’m not trying to brag, I probably can’t do whatever it is that you do. I definitely don’t want to be a soldier, or a garbage man, or a person that has to suck out the contents of a port-o-potty.

Transition.

I have many jobs as a property proprietor. Amanda and I have already explored several new professions in our short time as homeowners, none of which do I think I would want to do full time. Today we did something for the first time that we will surely do time, and time again: we paid our first mortgage payment; one down, 359 to go. We added a little on to the payment for the principle which we will try to do on a consistent basis to eliminate a few years’ worth of payments at the end.

This has been an incredibly long, tiring weekend. I am ready for bed, all day. But the work is never done. This post, however…


Afterthought: how do we turn this walk-in tub back into a normal tub? I need real answers.

 

Move

You know when you can’t get a towel off of a towel holder because it bunched up at some point because you tried to get it off at an angle because why would a towel be at an easy angle when you need it the most and all you really need to do is yank on it a little harder and it will come off and you can dry yourself? Just minutes ago that scenario happened in my downstairs bathroom after my very first shower at my new house. In this case, the towel bar was actually the handle of the freezer that is part of a freezer/fridge combo that was left by the former owners. It works, but it isn’t plugged in for now. Also in this case, I yanked extra hard to dislodge the towel and the freezer door opened explosively and the sharp handle smashed me in the middle of my forehead and I used an expletive that is not appropriate for children to hear at a volume that was not appropriate for an environment in which children are sleeping. This picture is the accumulation of the past 48-hours of packing, moving, moving shit around, being an electrician, not being even close to settled in yet, and being completely exhausted.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t look that terrible, but it’s the biggest bump I’ve had on my head since I was robbed by a knife and fist brandishing maniac almost four years ago.

That is not how I planned on starting this post. I am so happy to be here in this new place with the ones I love, that I want to share some more of my life’s progress with you in the form of pictures and words. So, here goes.

 

Two posts ago, I inserted some internet pictures to replace what I had wanted to show you from the closing day, and these are those pictures.

 

The photo is staged: nobody points at lines on which to sign; they're already clearly marked. I just thought it would be a good photo opportunity for my boy Roy (mortgage guy) and originally I wanted him in the background doing something creepy or funny. The second photo is a genuine moment of happiness. The seller had given me the set of keys and I handed one of them to Amanda, and I held the other up and smiled with pride.

 



When we were done, we drove to the house and we managed to take this selfie the old fashioned way: with a camera. It is perfect, and it captures the cheer and bliss we were feeling. This was before we had to do any of the hard work.

 

This is what covered every wall in the kitchen, laundry room, guest bedroom, and half of the bathroom. I had heard horror stories from people about the difficulties of removing wallpaper. I heard tips, tricks, and got advice from old people at hardware stores and everybody really was saying the same thing: it sucks. Well, they were right.

The wallpaper itself tricked me because it came down in giant sheets. We had all of the paper down in every room in about three hours. The glue. The fucking glue was another story.

This is that same wall with just the glue left. About one square-foot at a time, we applied wallpaper stripper, waited, scrubbed with steel wool, and wiped off the sticky mess. My mother and I were able to get the entire kitchen done in one sitting, and Amanda and I have made huge progress on the laundry room over the past couple weeks while trying to do many other things including life itself.

And this is after a lot of hard work by Amanda. I pitched in some too, but she had a lot to do with how beautiful it looks compared to the start. We learned the hard way that painter's tape should be taken down right after the painting is done, not three days later, but we were able to recover a few minor flaws with a little scraping and now it looks more beautiful than ever.

We painted the living room in one day but I don't have pictures of that. I will simply say that it looks more like a place to relax than it did before, and the colors all work well together.

And here we are just last night. This is a view over the mountain of stuff in the living room. The twenty-foot truck you see in the background drove about 120 miles over the two trips, and we carried everything inside just before the sun cast out it's last glimmers of light. We were just getting started, and that is where the next post will begin. For now, goodnight.





Nothing Much

I’m in a place. I can’t really tell you where I am or why I’m here, and that’s exciting for me. Where I am has no internet connection—for my computer—and it’s like back in the day when the internet didn’t exist. Of course, my phone is on the table just to my left and I can access any app and the World Wide Web with just the push of a button, but pretend-land is neat. I’m not in a place that’s detriment to my recovery or life; I’m just not going to tell you about it.

It’s Thursday. It’s 4:40pm, and we’re one workday away from moving day. We’ve been packing and purging. Goodwill is likely to have a profitable second quarter based solely on the donations removed from the 30X30 storage room that is attached to the apartment in which I currently reside, and Amanda has lived for some six years. This is a good purge, not like that movie in which all crimes are allowed for a day including murder.

We’re not just getting rid of stuff: Amanda is removing a significant part of her past from her life so we can move on to our new existence.  She has found a lot of painful memories, and it hasn’t been easy on her. That’s her story if she ever want’s to tell it.

We filled up a six-yard dumpster in one shot last night. If you’re wondering how big a six-yard dumpster is, it’s 6 ft 8 inches wide, and 5 ft 4 inches high, so that makes sense. We aren’t allowed to fill it up past the top which is stupid because she spent just south of $300 on the thing and they put it in the wrong driveway. But it did hold a lot, and it’s done and we can focus on moving forward.

At the new house in Silver Lake, we’ve completed the painting in the kitchen and living room. I really can’t wait to show pictures of the before and after because the difference is rather noteworthy bearing in mind the walls in the kitchen started as wallpaper, and the walls in the living room were a 1960’s shade of light green. There’s still some glue to remove in the laundry room and some light sanding and painting to do, but we got done what we needed to before we move. But this is not time to rest.

I managed to get moving day off of work (Thank you Jefe) so I can be part of what was going to be just a two-person moving team. Three is certainly better than two, but more is better than that. Last chance for anybody out there interested in helping out! The pay is $0 and the weather is supposed to be lousy. So…

I’ve not got much else to add to this post. I’ve been busy for weeks, and I need to do a little better about my meetings and my 12-step work, but I’m not in danger because I have plenty of reserve in the tank. I’m looking forward to checking out some new meetings in my new area when time allows, which is a necessity. This is what I’m going to look for  on my phone with the internet right now. Until next time…

Allpaper Down

Everything between the moment when I found out we were clear to close on the house, and the actual time I signed all of the documents, was a relaxing break. The closing itself happened in the office of my real-estate agent in Winsted with he and a representative of both title company and mortgage brokerage office in attendance. Two of the sellers ended up being there for the final thrilling moment. They had grown up in the house that their father had built, and grown old and died in along with their mother. They were there to get their check, sure, but it was more than that for all of us: it was an extension of life.

I signed paper after paper, and initialed line after line before it was done. Then the sellers handed me the key; I was speechless. I had been waiting 39 years for this moment, and four years ago I thought this was not even a possibility. Now nobody can take it away from me (as long as we pay for it.) Amanda took pictures of some of the critical moments but I left the camera at the new house, so I will post them at a later date. Actually, for this post, I will find pictures on the internet of other people doing things that look important.

Even though Amanda had to get back to work for our Cuatro de Mayo event, we drove to our new home after the closing to take pictures and bask in our accomplishment. We walked around the property inside and out, and we took a few more pictures. This is ours. This is our home.

Flash forward to Sunday, two days after closing. My mother was gracious enough to give up a day of her life to help peel wallpaper and remove glue. I—probably we—were under the supposition that we would be spending the whole day just getting the stuff down. We were wrong. In just under three hours, we (including Amanda) had all of the ugly wallcovering in plastic bags ready for disposal. The glue underneath, however, was a different story.

There are four rooms in all that need to be painted. The kitchen is first priority, so after removing the paper, we got to town with a stripper and began removing the glue one square foot at a time. The stripper left shortly after we began working, so we were able to be much more productive. Another four hours of scrubbing the glue and we were done. Well, done with the kitchen.

Yesterday Amanda and I went back to wash the walls with T.S.P. and prime. Everything looked so different than the day before. There is so much more to do in this house. My mind races to find all of the projects and complete them all as soon as possible, but today a very wise woman told me that summer is here, and we have a house that is fully functional to enjoy as a family. That made a lot of sense to me. There are a few superficial changes that need to be made before we move in, but after we are settled in, it’s time to enjoy the weather and save up to do these tasks in the winter. We currently have 360 payments left on our mortgage, so this is definitely a “long term” scenario. We are going to be there for a while, and I shouldn’t try to get the lot done now.

There are eleven days left until we move, and I have one day off until then. Actually, I have to work on moving day. For these eleven days I will try to get as much done with the walls in the four rooms as possible. A little paint is going to go a long way in making this place look a little more modern.

And that’s all. I’m going to stop writing so I can add funny pictures.

 

Hey, I found some real pictures from my phone. The top two are the result of the peeled wallpaper in the kitchen and laundry rooms. The bottom is a picture of said paper.