Family-Life

Poor sleep last night.

So the Daylight Savings Time switch was this weekend, so everyone felt fully capable of staying up until midnight watching movies. This weekend we watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Friday, the final episode of Agent Carter and the first in the Hobbit trilogy on Sunday.

I’m uneasy. I have my second (well, final) cataract surgery on Wednesday–as luck would have it St. Patrick’s Day. I went to bed before Whitney and Maria and when they went to bed I woke up with my mind swimming from flashbacks from the last cataract surgery: The immense anxiety. The claustrophobia of being draped with just your eye poking out. The general fear of the smells of a surgical center.

The world went to hell on 13 March 2020.

We’d been watching a slow-motion tidal wave from China come our way since January. We’d hoped it’d stop like SARS in mainland China, and we’d get to say “Whew! Close one.” Nope.

We saw it bloom in Europe, but hey–we’re still an ocean away from this thing, right? No.

On March 13, I got the email saying “Work from Home until further notice.” Then a few weeks later, it became “We’ll evaluate but stay home until May 1st at least.”

If the “Great Lockdown” or whatever history calls this thing had sight, smell, sound, taste, and feel, what would they be?

Feel is easy: Tired. The feel of a not-so-early morning after a long night of binge-watching whatever (Mandalorian, Picard, Friends). Being tired for no particular reason, like the tired of a long road trip or transcontinental flight: You haven’t exerted yourself, but you’re exhausted, disoriented, and cranky.

CoVid19 tastes like bad breath, that cottonmouth you get from dehydration after too late a night or far too early a morning. It also tastes like the Diet Coke® I secret away in my gun safe so my kids won’t drink any.

So, phase one (shock/denial) appears to be over.

Over 20 million people are out of work, roughly a 20% unemployment rate.

There are almost 700k total cases, and 32k deaths. This is just from people we know had the disease.

Whatever “rainy day funds” most people had are exhausting. Quickly.

It seems clear, this is going to be somewhere between the “Great Recession” and the “Great Depression.” And honestly: There’s no end in sight.

So, it’s official as of today

(Source. As an aside, this ‘worldometers.info’ site is a clinic on how to present and visualize data at scale.)

Eight-three thousand cases, and no sign of let-up after 2 solid weeks of “shelter-in-place” or “stay-home-pretty-please”

New York is simply exploding, especially The City.

I’ve taken to following a former member of disaster preparedness for Obama, @JeremyKonyndyk. Here’s his take as of today:

We’re not “flattening the curve.” We’re accelerating. We’re fighting our health care system.

Well, at least yesterday was good, right?

The stock market went up by 2,000 points. The Congress seemed to agree on–depending how you count it–a SIX TRILLION DOLLAR (!) bailout package, that represents a quarter of the US annual GDP. This comprises:

• 2 Trillion in relief for businesses and regular Folksy
• 4 Trillion in authority for the Fed to buy….stuff. REITs, ETF, Bonds, etc.

Today has been less rosy.

Last night, I was up with grace in immense pain until 11 or so, then I just collapsed in my bed. I finally got to work by 9am…only to find that I had a mandatory 45-minute Mac OS Catalina upgrade (10.15.4, if you’r scoring at home) to do.

“You’re choosing to watch the news. You can choose not to.”

Yesterday, made an excursion to Randall’s to get some supplies after I got my daughter’s medication in Cedar Park. The store had more than I expected, but the necessities had evaporated. Bottled water, paper goods, bread, milk. I saw a yuppie buying all the individual cereal containers, bragging about how he had “Fifteen Gallons of Milk” at home.

For himself.

It continues today. Every day feels like a week.

As of this writing, stocks are down 8%, just today. This a snapshot of the cnn.com headlines:

Not good.

There’s news the executive is invoking War Emergency provisions to get priority production for necessities. Per my recollection, the last time that happened was in World War 2.

Yesterday was a better day; I was able to work a bit. Today has just been staring at headlines. I must stop. I must work.

And so it begins

As I write this, it’s 5pm on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not wearing green. I’m sitting at home in our spare bedroom, with a 24" monitor ahead of me, and Amazon Basics® Keyboard instead of my beloved CODE Keyboard, and the world aflame.

I agree with this tweet:

Basically, the news since last week has been Through-the-Looking-Glass bad. A Quick rundown for posterity:

• Starting mid February, the stock market is down a third from its highs. February 19th, the Dow closed at 29,386. Today, it closed 21,237. Earlier today, it was under 20,000, briefly. Trillions of dollars of market value have been erased in six weeks. Yeterday in particular, the Dow lost 12% of its value, or about 3000 points. In one day.

“It seems like I should write something about coronavirus,” I thought to myself.

I’m sitting in a very empty Amazon office in Austin, Texas on a Saturday. I’m trying to make-up for a day I took off on Wednesday to shuttle Grace to a Primary Care doctor who promptly told me to take her to Dell Children’s Hospital for possible appendicitis.

I knew it wasn’t appendicitis, but meh. I needed some time away from work. There’s been a swizzle of what Amazon calls “Product,” meaning two new “Managers” came on my project. Now we have:

Today is my daughter’s 13th birthday.

Thirteen years ago, I watched my wife attempt to deliver our child naturally via the Bradley method, then I watched my daughter get stuck at -2 station, her head caught on my wife’s pelvis, and I watched a sex-addicted doctor cut her open and finally bring my daughter into the world.

My account of that day

What I left out, of course, was how utterly unprepared I was to be a father. Overwhelmed with emotion, between that 11pm and 11:30pm timestamp, I stood in the room where my wife had tried to push out our daughter, and I cried. I stood there and sobbed. I know now, those were sobs of crushing anxiety cresting into relief. They were both going to be okay.

What happened in 2019?

I like to do year-in-review posts every year or after specific milestones, like changing jobs or having big projects finish.

So, if 2018 was a triumph, 2019 was its hangover.

Family

Both my parents are still alive, and are ornery as ever.

Throughout most of 2019, our relationship with our son was estranged, most acutely when we flew up to Kentucky in May to see him graduate Franklin County High School when he refused to see us before, during, or after graduation.

I’ve just been having a rough time lately.

I’m like an overstuffed Tupperware and me trying to close the lid and put one foot in front of the other isn’t working so well in the past few days.

This is me attempting to talk that out, to myself.

To begin: My sixteen-year-old stepson chose not to live with us, and the Kentucky judiciary has supported that decision.  Months of preparation and legal wrangling resulted to a seven minute conversation in chambers.  That was a month ago, June 8th, and the reality of it settles upon me a little more each day.  It’s all just sadness and anger, and it comes out at inconvenient times for no apparent reason.

Joey fired us.

Tomorrow marks two weeks since that was official.

I love my son.
I miss my son.

Maybe this was all a mistake.

I have no idea.

Perhaps that’s the beginning of Faith.

If so, faith is painful as Hell.

And lonely.

So fine, and sunny, and smiling, and empty.

It’s said that God breaks us, so he might rebuild us.
I’m a thousand pieces flying in close formation.

Me: “Hey Joey, what would you like to do today?”

He: “Let’s go iceskating.”

[…silence…]

She: “Dad doesn’t do iceskating.”

Me: “I can do it if I have to.”

* * *

Ah famous last words.

I’ve been working alot lately.  Let me rephrase:  I’ve been working roughly 9:30->8pm M-T-R-F.  I haven’t been working late Wednesdays because of Church, and not Fridays because something usually comes-up.  I haven’t been able to spend much time with my son, and we’re both missing it.

At the risk of sounding like a mommyblogger: It’s difficult to hear yet another thing your child’s food allergies prevent.  Honestly, at times, it feels like my kids are going to end-up in some Food Allergy ghetto wearing a medical alert bracelet staring out through plexiglass at kids luxuriating with their peanut butter, quiche, and potato salad.

Yeah, I’m sad.  This is part of my process of getting over it, so bear with me.

Five-year-old Joey:  “Harold, when are we going hunting?”

My step-son is a canonical boy:  Around age 1, his mother reported him fashioning pistols and shooting her with his toast.  He likes taking things apart.  He loves archery, and he’s fascinated by firearms.  We live in Kentucky, so most consider this not Neanderthal DNA expressing itself, but the natural order of things.

So yeah, hunting.

As with many things in my life, I found myself in the 1.5 day Kentucky Orange Card certification class this past Friday and Saturday through an odd chain of events:  We actually read the 4-H letter from our local Ag Extension office.  (We get the 4-H letter because we signed-up for a community garden plot last year, but I dropped the ball and we never planted it.)  In the newsletter was a blurb about Scott County 4-H Shooting sports:  Archery, air rifle, air pistol, .22 rifle, .22 pistol, and trap.  It appeared this was all free.  There was an additional blurb:  In order to participate in the things that go boom, you needed your orange card certification.

So, my daughter found a cute trick about 3 weeks ago:  If you set a bunch of dry oatmeal in a non-microwavable playset bowl on 5 minutes in the microwave, it catches fire.

Lots of fun things result:  You mommy trotting you out into the cold, lots of folks with sirens showing up, seeing the inside of a Crown Victoria as you shelter from the sub-zero temperatures.

Thankfully, though the microwave was toast and there was smoke in the house, nothing happened permanently and everyone was safe.

I understand this is meaningless to anyone besides me, but I just wanted to jot it down.

She said, “I don’t know who it is, but it’s not you.  It used to be, and I think it’s sad that it’s not anymore.”

And you know what, she’s right.  I agree with her.  Long about July 2011, I took a left turn and lost myself a bit.  Not quite sure what to do with that.

I imagine this convo someday:

“You really believe there’s some magic guy up in the sky who created the Universe?  Do you also believe in Santa Claus?”

The respondent will be one of my children:

I’ve never believed in Santa Claus.  I would like to tell you about a real guy named Jesus and what He did for me….

Yep, we’re those people.  Santa Claus doesn’t give our children presents, we give each other presents to celebrate the greatest unearned present ever, salvation.   Our kids are the all-too-honest little antichrists who send your little Timmy or Terry home crying from Kindergarten, “MOM!  Maria said Santa Claus isn’t real.”