Congratulations!

4am comes early, 4am to be precise. This morning I awoke to another Minnesota blizzard, and braved the storm to go to the gym as I normally do on my days off. I’ve been a busy boy. I’m at the tail-end of a complete financial makeover. When I got out of prison, I accumulated an incredible amount of debt acquiring a lifetime of needs, and the debt continued to climb when we bought a house. I’m talking about credit card debt; the worst kind. We are at a point now where we no longer need the aid of high-interest cards to obtain our livelihood, so I consolidated all of it into a much lower interest rate loan. I pay about the same every month, but I pay a lot more toward the actual debt.

I have also refinanced the minivan and the house into lower-interest loans. It actually costs quite a bit to lower the payments, but the numbers added up to significant savings over the terms of the loans. The house was appraised at $10k over what it was last time, so we have more equity right off the bat.

I said in a meeting the other night that I was astonished that I was capable of even starting these tasks, let alone credit-worthy. A lot has changed over the past 5+ years, and I am happy to settle into this cozy life for a while before I try the next big thing.

 I should mention that I am still working on the basement wall, which has all of the drywall up and the first coat of mud over the tape. If it weren’t for great neighbors, I would have been lost in a mystery of angles, measurements, and electrical maneuvering. I still don’t yet feel confident to tackle the upstairs bathroom, but maybe when the basement is done, I’ll give the old tile a knock-down.

 

In unrelated news, I recently became a certified ServSafe instructor and proctor. This means I can teach the course required for the Minnesota Food Manager’s certificate, and administer the exam itself. I suppose the exam is the requirement for the certificate, but I’m not using backspace today, buddy. I have yet to make a certified proctologist joke at work or at home, but it’s coming.

It’s a complicated process, the course management. I haven’t fully figured it all out. There are hundreds of pages of instructions and information that I haven’t quite assembled in my head yet, but I will keep reading until I understand what to do and build confidence to schedule my first class.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I am also a HACCP manager, and I’m still in the works with the Health Department to get my first plan approved. I’ve sent in my third revision, and I have high hopes that his time I won’t have missed any scientific data. I have typed clostridium botulinum so many times, I didn’t even have to right-click on a red underlined mistype to get it right. I had to draw by hand something called a process flow diagram because I am so computer program illiterate that I couldn’t figure out how to make boxes with arrows with words in them. But hand-drawn is an acceptable format for the health department, so I sent it. Maybe I’ll get a gold star or other type of congratulatory sticker for my artwork. I can only hope.

 

And finally, speaking of congratulations, I am sick of being congratulated for things I haven’t done. Specifically, every day I receive an email from PayPal that congratulates me for qualifying for a 2% back credit card. Looking closer at the advertisement, I’m actually being congratulated for the opportunity to apply. I’ve accomplished nothing, and I believe PayPal is diminishing the effect of the word which should only be used to recognize bronze or higher Olympians. Or, to take this to the extreme, here is a short list of tasks and small accomplishments that I believe deserve a congratulations and a handshake:

1.       Getting a haircut

2.       Using a coupon

3.       Completing a one-season show

4.       Sneezing

5.       Eating most of a meal

6.       Reading this blog post

 

Congratulations everybody! You really should feel like a winner.

20/20

Finding time to write has been rather difficult over the past month, to say the least. Work has been hectic, and it feels like the girls have been out of school and daycare for weeks, which I suppose is partially true. Yesterday I put in my longest day of the year, as I always do on New Year’s Eve. The club has its annual elaborate last dinner before the (some of the) members go off to their cozy cottages in Arizona and Florida, and for the next three months, we recover, create, and plan for the coming summer.

Here at home, I’ve been working on a project—since before the wedding, Amanda might add—that has tested my patience and my pride, but it would appear that I am winning and have made significant progress over the past week or so.

 I decided on a warm summer evening that I wanted to see what was behind the wood paneling in our basement, so I peeked. Then I peeled, and then I demolished the entire wall. I wanted to put up drywall so as to modernize at least part of the unfinished basement, so a neighbor came to help me put up a frame on which we could attach said gypsum board. Whilst building the frame, the radiator in front of the project sprung a leak, and emptied the contents of our heating system onto the basement floor, requiring an HVAC worker to spend significant time sealing and re-charging the system. While he was here, I had him replace some old and deteriorating pipes since they would all be sealed back up in the ceiling presumably for the rest of my life. I also had them move the radiator out another three inches so we could more easily maneuver around it while working. Problem solved. I am grateful we have plenty in savings for such emergencies, and I must say that our heat appears to be working much more efficiently—or at the very least less expensively.

Some time passed after the wedding, and the project lay in repose for months until finally I got the bug to start up again. The frame is finished—again with much assistance—and I even ran new wiring and outlet and sconce boxes along the wall. It looks good. It looks ready for drywall. Now, don’t tell anybody about the wiring I did because I don’t exactly know the rules about wiring your own home. It’ll be our secret.

In the next few days the Sheetrock will go up, we will tape, mud, and sand, then prime and paint. Next up is the trim, ceiling repair, and we will be ready for carpeting. We will then have significant finished space in the basement, as top, bottom, and walls will all be in place.

I wrote all of that telling no jokes, which isn’t really like me. It’s 6:43am, and I’ve been up for over two hours. It’s been a trend as of late, for me to get up early. I’m usually out of bed and moving around before 5am. I’m not overly tired during the day, but I definitely go to bed earlier than I did in my younger days, and I go to sleep days earlier than I did when on meth.

 

2019 was a rough year for our family. I’ve written that it included four funerals and we lost the family dog. It was also a year of happiness, as Amanda and I married, and we became an official family. The girls are wild-non-stop, but it’s a cheerful chaos that I love coming home to. They look up to me—because I am way taller than them—and I support them in every way possible. Little Emme started pre-K this year (for which we are responsible for payment?) and she is making waves of progress, albeit in semi-frustrating increments. Counting to ten was hard for her until recently, which was difficult to deal with because I can count well into the lower 50’s only missing one or two numbers. She’s progressing as any normal kid does, and we are very proud of her.

Ella is in dance and Girl Scouts, and she loves math and reading. She is an incredible artist and is  loving toward her friends and family. She’s curious about the world, and is eager to explore the big cities.

Amanda, my wife, has succeeded in her new job as F&B Manager (a title we believe only exists on her business card.) She, too, has made leaps and bounds coming out of her shell, and being more open and communicative with me. She has an understanding that I care about her thoughts and opinions, and that I value her as my partner in this little family. We parent well together, although imperfectly. Every day the learning curve seems to adjust or tilt upside down altogether, but we make it through, and face another day.

I made it through another calendar year without a drink or a drug. This past Thursday I went to the county jail to bring a meeting to the inmates inside. Some days are better than others in these meetings, and this one was particularly rough in that there was a lot of pain in the room that needed to be addressed. I only get an hour, and I will likely never see them again, and my only hope is that they glean one thing that at least makes them think that there is hope.

After a man spoke about what I perceived as unresolved resentments involving nearly everybody in his life, I told him about how I used to hang on to that shit, too. And after some time in prison, a few meetings, and some step-work, I was able to let go of it, and actually repair the relationships I had with those I had harmed. The 4^th step is pretty amazing; it gives one the opportunity to see the mistakes you made in a relationship, so you know what you need to make amends for later. It lets you turn the page on how others have wronged you, and opens the door for restoration. After my speech, he remained quiet. Introspectively, I hope he understood that he could have his family and friends back with a lot of hard work, and some significant abstinence.

I apologize daily for things I have done, whether I think I am wrong or not. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to win a fight. I’d rather be happy than right, and I’m not always right so I guess I’ll shoot for happy in 2020.

One last thought. Restraint of pen and tongue has gotten me through some situations that could have been escalated by angry verbiage. They say hindsight is 20/20, so how about this year, wait. Don’t react; just take a day to think about what somebody has said or done to you, and use your hindsight real-time. It might save you from resentment, which will inevitably lead to anger, unproductivity, and diarrhea.

Happy New Year, everybody! May this be your best year yet.