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.

The House

This is the third in a series of posts that starts here.

I was at my grandparent’s house; all was quiet. I had checked all of the rooms they would normally be in that time of day and come up empty. I tried calling their landline phone because sometimes they carry the cordless with them when they move around within their assisted living community, but I heard the phone ring in the chair next to me and felt a little stupid for not seeing it. My cellphone started ringing and I thought maybe they were somehow calling me back from an unknown location, but my caller I.D. told me that it was my real-estate agent. I hurriedly swiped the green icon.

It was Wednesday evening, and I hadn’t expected a call from him at the earliest until Thursday night. In my head, I already knew that he was calling to tell me that somebody had put in a much higher offer on our house, and that I would no longer be in the running. I knew it was too good to be true, after all, this house was amazing, and it had everything we wanted. I was wrong. He was calling to inform me that the family had accepted our offer, with only a few minor amendments to the original.

He went on to explain what the sellers wanted, but all I could hear was my blood flowing. All I could think about was telling Amanda the news she had been so nervously anticipating. I was already stripping the wallpaper off the walls in the kitchen in my head when the call ended and all I gleaned from the rest of the chat was that the closing date will be May 4^th. Quatro de Mayo? My phone rang again and I got to tell a friend with a trembling voice, “I got the house!” I was absolutely jubilant.

I made several calls, sent many texts, and finally found my grandparents and told them the news in person. As usual on Wednesday nights, I went to a very large meeting in St. Paul where many of my dear friends in recovery gather and shared it with them as well. I wasn’t bragging, I was telling them the outcome of over three years of hard work in recovery. I started a recent post by saying that four years ago I was sleeping in cars and on couches, I can’t forget that. These people know who I am, and they are the first ones to tell me that things are going really well for me right now, so I need to be careful.

 

Today I signed some more forms, and fielded emails from my mortgage broker and asked probably too many questions. He needs my bank statements from the last two months. Why? Will they see anything on them that will make this all go away? Have I done anything that will cost us this dream? FUCK!

Everybody on the business side of things keeps assuring me that everything is going smoothly, and I don’t have anything to be worried about. All I need to do is wait it out, review and sign forms when they come, and relax; there’s plenty of hard work ahead. Worry is hard work too, and I don’t get paid for it, so I will just sit back and relax until this house becomes our home.

 

I want to thank all of you who have sent encouraging words over the past week. I listen well, and your thoughts are still with me. This is the beginning of a fantastic journey, and I can’t wait to write my way through it all.

 

House(s) 2

Lucky you, two blog posts in two days. This post is a perpetuation of my last so you may consider clicking on the blue link to start from the beginning. I suppose when you get to the end you’ll notice that I stated that I would patiently wait for the outcome of something that was no longer in my control, but I am an addict, so I like to push everything.

In my former state of life, if I had been given an opportunity to spend roughly $150,000, I wonder how long it would have taken me to fuck it all up. Surely I would have tried to procure the loan somehow in cash form so I could “roll it” real quick into more by buying and selling drugs, thus ensuring a larger home, and some money to “play with.” Well, I’m doing things a little differently with a few years away from the hard stuff. I’m “responsible” now, it says so on the contract I signed recently for the offer I put down on the house I love, although the terminology may have been a little different.

Yesterday we found another house in Silver Lake that we both like, and decided we should take a look at it to broaden our horizons on what we could/should be looking for in houses. We both are pretty lucky in that we like most of the same things in houses, so that makes things much easier. This house we are going to look at today has less space, less of what we are looking for, and costs a little more money. It has more of some things like garage space, and property. I emailed my agent last night about looking at it and when I woke up I saw the response and I got a little tingly.

He stated that we could see the other house but he had a good feeling about our offer on the one we love. The selling agent had called him to let him know that the sellers were working on the items we had asked to be repaired before our offer was accepted. Now, that’s not an accepted offer, but it’s great news. It gives us hope. It will also be a bigger let down if anything else happens. I have been prepared to be let down most of my life, but that attitude changed a while back and I might even feel it a little bit on this one if it goes wrong.

Life will not end if we do not get this house. There are other houses, in other neighborhoods, in other towns. Life goes on, and we keep looking for the one. Or it all ends tomorrow at 6pm which is the offer deadline. I will absolutely keep you posted.

On another note, I’ve been a little nervous about talking to my parole officer about this move. Not because I’m afraid she won’t let me, but because of the process involved in me changing counties because I am property of the state until July 22^nd. In my life, when fear crops up, I am told by my sponsor and the Big Book that I need to address it right away, or I will dwell on it, and that will interfere with my primary purpose of placing respectable action and thought into the stream of life, and helping the still-suffering alcoholic/addict. So I had to make that call. And just like everything else I have held on to for a little too long, this was no big deal. She told me that she wouldn’t transfer me because I am too close to the end, and that she was fine with me moving wherever I wanted to so long as she had my address. Well, fuck, that’s 20 solid minutes of worrying I could have avoided over the past couple weeks.

All in all, I am in a happy place in my life. A lot of moving pieces are moving at an incredible speed, and I’m able to handle them with composure and sensibility. I am aware of myself and others that are in my life, and I am able to make decisions in the best interest of everybody involved in this endeavor. And I am not alone. I have loved ones in my corner helping me along the way, and guiding me with the voice of God as I understand him.

It may look as if I’m giving you people a lot of power there, telling you that your collective voice is my God. But that’s the only way it can all make sense to me. I know I couldn’t stay sober without the collective voice I hear at the meetings that I attend, and deprived of the expressions of my three ladies and my family, I would not be in the place I am now. Maybe you can put another name on it, but I choose to call it God because it works for me, and I am happy.