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Heading Toward the End
Dec. 22nd, 2021 10:33 pmIt's been four weeks now since we lost Callisto. I'm still feeling it. It's going to take a while to get over because she was so relatively young, because we had to decide that we'd done all that we could in a situation where it wasn't just old age. It was tough.
My Blockchain Commons work has been good, because I have problems and needs set in front of me and I have an 8-hour period to work on them when I'm aware that someone else is paying for the time. But I've been dragging on all my personal writing. It's been hard to maintain the interest. So, it's crawling along, so, so, so much slower than it should. And I often feel like I'm dragging in the evenings. Mindless playing Railroad Ink Challenge on the computer, not really willing do much more engagement with something like reading.
After Callisto's passing I had the only moment I've ever had when I wondered what we were doing out here in Hawaii. It was momentary, just a day's thought, but the void in our house was just so obvious. Callisto was a big cat, both in size and personality. And though we have my dad and Mary, there were no other local friends to fill that void, and so it was just there.
I've moved on, from that at least. But the need to make friends is that much more obvious to me. It's the pandemic, the *)(#$@# pandemic. I *was* starting to make new friends at 8 Moves Ahead in the month that I went there before the pandemic, but I haven't been willing to go out gaming since.
We thought we were ready to start opening our lives more this summer, then Delta hit. That was the plan again after this Christmas visit, but now we have Omnicron.
But, maybe I can visit the new game store, Crow's Nest, sometime in January. Maybe I can put out the word and see if anyone is willing to get together specifically for eurogames.
And Lucy has been very weird since Callisto's passing. Very loud weird. She's constantly talking. Sometimes yowling in other rooms. Always begging for her food. Sometimes standing on one of us and mewwing right in our face.
Except for the day we brought her home, when she mewwed in her cardboard cat carrier the whole mile or so home from Your Basic Bird, where we adopted her, she's been mostly silent (other than the purring). But since, not so much.
I think she's gotten a little quieter in the last week or so. Maybe she's getting used to the new normal.
But I feel so bad that we're leaving her for Christmas. We left her alone once before, in 2013 after Cobweb and Munchkin had passed, and when we got home she let out the longest mew I'd ever heard, just a constant, monotone mew. We assumed she'd been very lonely (though she had a daily visiter, something that we instituted after Munchkin locked herself in the Junk Room on a previous Hawaii visit). I hope she accepts my dad's luvs when we're gone this time.
We had a loss that should be much bigger a few days ago. My Uncle Bob passed. COVID. If he was unvaccinated, that's even a greater tragedy.
I feel it, it's certainly adding to my malaise. When I talked to my dad today I could tell he was shaken, because they'd just talked two weeks ago. But my Uncle Bob was a distant, gruff presence to me. I remember the pride with which he showed off his naked furniture store (long gone), I remember the amused and tolerant love he always expressed for his kids. I know those kids, my cousins, probably now all in their 40s, are grieving big-time. I am grieving too, but it's distant.
Good stuff?
We had a nice Christmas at my dad's house this last Sunday. We had delicious ham and crescent rolls and I don't even remember what else in large part because Thanksgiving and our Hawaii Christmas just totally blurred together this year.
Afterward, we played Tichu, which I'd finally found in a box after a year or so of looking. It smelled musty which made me unhappy, because generally things have been storing well in their boxes, and now I'm worried that things might be getting ruined.
But that's a problem for not today.
And my dad and I did a little work on the house, something that hadn't happened since long ago (since they went to California themselves at the end of October).
We fixed a light switch in our bathroom which had stopped working. (Apparently, just a flaky switch that we needed to swap; easy, I could do that!)
We finished making the transition into my office. (Looks great! I'm happy every time I see it. And, I'm aware that I still have to floor the closet and we have more transitions to do under the door, but that's a problem that's definitely in the future, because it's not a critical path for anything else.)
We started in on the tiles in the family room. (This is pretty much the last problem on my list of things to resolve before we get shelving in. The problem is that something got done wrong when they were installed, so there are at least 7 or 8 tiles which peeled up from the floor and are various degrees of warped. But my dad chiseled the grout off of one of the tiles and pulled it up and then got the adhesive under the tile off. We've now got it reset on cardboard. (That's temporary!) I could do that too! So we need to do that work with 6 or 7 more tiles, then seal the ground with something waterproof, in case the issue was water coming up or across, then re-adhere them, then put grout in around them. And then at last the shelving work can begin.)
I'm hoping this trip can be a Great Reset for us. That we can come back to Hawaii and have left some of the badness of this fall behind, that we can get out and make friends a little more, that we can at last move on getting the last elements into our house to make it really usable (shelves, retaining wall).
Hoping.
(But I definitely wanted to write this journal now, before we left, so I can do my best to put it all behind me. Our flight is in just less than 12 hours.)
My Blockchain Commons work has been good, because I have problems and needs set in front of me and I have an 8-hour period to work on them when I'm aware that someone else is paying for the time. But I've been dragging on all my personal writing. It's been hard to maintain the interest. So, it's crawling along, so, so, so much slower than it should. And I often feel like I'm dragging in the evenings. Mindless playing Railroad Ink Challenge on the computer, not really willing do much more engagement with something like reading.
After Callisto's passing I had the only moment I've ever had when I wondered what we were doing out here in Hawaii. It was momentary, just a day's thought, but the void in our house was just so obvious. Callisto was a big cat, both in size and personality. And though we have my dad and Mary, there were no other local friends to fill that void, and so it was just there.
I've moved on, from that at least. But the need to make friends is that much more obvious to me. It's the pandemic, the *)(#$@# pandemic. I *was* starting to make new friends at 8 Moves Ahead in the month that I went there before the pandemic, but I haven't been willing to go out gaming since.
We thought we were ready to start opening our lives more this summer, then Delta hit. That was the plan again after this Christmas visit, but now we have Omnicron.
But, maybe I can visit the new game store, Crow's Nest, sometime in January. Maybe I can put out the word and see if anyone is willing to get together specifically for eurogames.
And Lucy has been very weird since Callisto's passing. Very loud weird. She's constantly talking. Sometimes yowling in other rooms. Always begging for her food. Sometimes standing on one of us and mewwing right in our face.
Except for the day we brought her home, when she mewwed in her cardboard cat carrier the whole mile or so home from Your Basic Bird, where we adopted her, she's been mostly silent (other than the purring). But since, not so much.
I think she's gotten a little quieter in the last week or so. Maybe she's getting used to the new normal.
But I feel so bad that we're leaving her for Christmas. We left her alone once before, in 2013 after Cobweb and Munchkin had passed, and when we got home she let out the longest mew I'd ever heard, just a constant, monotone mew. We assumed she'd been very lonely (though she had a daily visiter, something that we instituted after Munchkin locked herself in the Junk Room on a previous Hawaii visit). I hope she accepts my dad's luvs when we're gone this time.
We had a loss that should be much bigger a few days ago. My Uncle Bob passed. COVID. If he was unvaccinated, that's even a greater tragedy.
I feel it, it's certainly adding to my malaise. When I talked to my dad today I could tell he was shaken, because they'd just talked two weeks ago. But my Uncle Bob was a distant, gruff presence to me. I remember the pride with which he showed off his naked furniture store (long gone), I remember the amused and tolerant love he always expressed for his kids. I know those kids, my cousins, probably now all in their 40s, are grieving big-time. I am grieving too, but it's distant.
Good stuff?
We had a nice Christmas at my dad's house this last Sunday. We had delicious ham and crescent rolls and I don't even remember what else in large part because Thanksgiving and our Hawaii Christmas just totally blurred together this year.
Afterward, we played Tichu, which I'd finally found in a box after a year or so of looking. It smelled musty which made me unhappy, because generally things have been storing well in their boxes, and now I'm worried that things might be getting ruined.
But that's a problem for not today.
And my dad and I did a little work on the house, something that hadn't happened since long ago (since they went to California themselves at the end of October).
We fixed a light switch in our bathroom which had stopped working. (Apparently, just a flaky switch that we needed to swap; easy, I could do that!)
We finished making the transition into my office. (Looks great! I'm happy every time I see it. And, I'm aware that I still have to floor the closet and we have more transitions to do under the door, but that's a problem that's definitely in the future, because it's not a critical path for anything else.)
We started in on the tiles in the family room. (This is pretty much the last problem on my list of things to resolve before we get shelving in. The problem is that something got done wrong when they were installed, so there are at least 7 or 8 tiles which peeled up from the floor and are various degrees of warped. But my dad chiseled the grout off of one of the tiles and pulled it up and then got the adhesive under the tile off. We've now got it reset on cardboard. (That's temporary!) I could do that too! So we need to do that work with 6 or 7 more tiles, then seal the ground with something waterproof, in case the issue was water coming up or across, then re-adhere them, then put grout in around them. And then at last the shelving work can begin.)
I'm hoping this trip can be a Great Reset for us. That we can come back to Hawaii and have left some of the badness of this fall behind, that we can get out and make friends a little more, that we can at last move on getting the last elements into our house to make it really usable (shelves, retaining wall).
Hoping.
(But I definitely wanted to write this journal now, before we left, so I can do my best to put it all behind me. Our flight is in just less than 12 hours.)