Dwarf Planet in Purple

Content warning: grief in the aftermath of death.

( To continue the story of Christmas evening... )

The first few days were ... tough. I cried for almost no reason. ( Read more... )

On Thursday the 26th Maugie and Patches invited me and a couple of other friends over to dinner. They gave me the courage to text Nick's parents from his phone (but identifying myself as myself, NOT as Nick, of course). The next morning Nick's mother wrote back, and we started exchanging messages. Apparently the ME's office had left her a phone message asking her to come to Baltimore to pick up her son's body, and she had thought it was a hoax at first. Well, duh, who wouldn't think that?!? I also had to explain a few things to her. She thought that Nick worked at the National Archives and that he was dating a woman (named Kathy) with a brain tumor. Uh, nope, not true at all. No wonder Nick didn't want me to meet his parents, in case I accidentally told the truth.

Anyhow, Nick's mother (a retired Episcopal priest) made arrangements with a Maryland funeral home to have Nick cremated. In the spring she will have his remains interred in the family plot in southern Michigan, where his grandparents are buried and where Nick's parents will eventually be interred. He won't be alone for eternity.

In the days afterward, Patches and another SCA friend, Clara, helped me go through all the stuff in my storage unit and pull out things that belonged to Nick and that his family might be interested in. (That was a *lot* of work.) Two other friends, Marilyn and Dave, came by my place and helped me take down the Christmas decorations. I'm glad I didn't have to do that alone because of all the floods of memories. Dave also unclogged the bathroom drains for me, and Marilyn brought me a lovely bouquet of flowers.

On January 9th I met Nick's mother and brother at the Blue and Green Cottage. (Nick's father didn't make the trip from San Antonio because he has Parkinson's.) Nick's mother was very pleasant, all things considered, and she didn't want to take too much stuff -- just family photos, letters to and from his late grandmother during World War II, a few shirts he sewed for himself, a couple of knickknacks. Nick's brother didn't say much. He is just not talkative, apparently. The two of them spent only about 90 minutes here.

There were a couple of things Nick's mother wanted that I couldn't find before her visit: a cardigan sweater that belonged to his grandfather and a Japanese sword that was some sort of spoils of WWII. Nick's brother came by, solo, to pick them up once I found them. He wasn't any more talkative.

Nick's mother and I had agreed on the disposition of Nick's stuff: I can keep the household goods, his clothes should go to charity, etc. To be honest, I think I'm going to keep his T-shirts because we took the same size. I just want to find a good place to donate his pants and miscellaneous stuff to -- a charity that will actually give the clothes to homeless people and/or refugees, as opposed to the places that resell only a small fraction of what they receive and throw the rest into either fabric recycling or the landfill. Given how Nick and I teetered on the edge of homelessness a couple of years ago, it seems only right to use his wardrobe to help people who really need the help. Especially in these cold, cruel days of the new Amerikan dictatorship.

I guess I haven't really probed all my feelings about Nick's passing. I'll put them in another post when I get a chance (I've got only a couple of days left before I disappear into the election-judging void for seven straight days -- primary for my county's special election). My emotions have veered all over the place, particularly in the last few weeks. They have taken me into some completely unexpected headspace. It's been an emotional roller-coaster.

I have to pick the boy toy up at the airport in a few hours. He's flying back from a week with his parents in San Antonio. I always insist on knowing the flight number when I'm picking someone up from the airport, because in 1989 I was supposed to pick up a co-worker at the airport, heard about a jetliner crash in Iowa (I think, IIRC), and had a panic attack because I had NO idea where she was coming from, which airline she was using, etc. (She has family and friends all over the country.) Fortunately, she was NOT on that plane and was waiting for me at Logan Airport.

I'll be glad to have him back, because he keeps me on schedule (in an "accountability partner" kind of way). I have been in major ADHD mode these last few days. Baronial newsletter, finishing "get out the vote" postcards to get them to Florida before Hurricane Milton, watching TV, reading news stories on the computer, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, I have a highly technical feature article to write.

The good news about early voting: I'm scheduled to work for all eight days of it. The bad news about early voting: I have been assigned to a different early-voting station. Not that much farther away, but still, I was looking forward to seeing the folks who work in College Park. Particularly that lifestyle blogger who supports her whole family with that blog. Dang, I wish I could do that!

Now that I am a baronial chronicler, I really find this piece hilarious. And eerily aligned with today's Nobel Prize in physics.

In late March, I wrote but never posted:

Now that my latest feature article is done, what do I do next?

As I had been promising myself, I started practicing the ukulele. Since I've taken up several musical instruments over my ever-lengthening life, I know that the beginning is the steepest part of the learning curve. My left-hand fingertips felt tender, but I can say I know three chords now: C, F, and A minor. All three involve only one or two fingers. I really want to learn G major, but that involves three fingers, which is a bit more cumbersome for my non-dominant hand and brain. Still, I want to learn, even if I learn at a slower pace than a youngster.

I am still singing with Laydes Fayre, Mistress Arianna's group, but I had to skip the March 22 practice session because I had to attend a church trustees' meeting about candidates for our next developmental minister. That's about all I can say because of confidentiality rules.

Then this weekend came about, and I am

I was probably going to write, "I am so tired I can barely write..." *grin* Fast forward to late April.

The weekend of March 22-23 was a double-event weekend in my SCA world. On Saturday I went to Defending the Gate, at which one of my friends got her Laurel (highest award for arts and sciences) and also stepped up as Baroness of Stierbach (with her husband as the new Baron). On Sunday my own barony, Storvik, had an informal "spring thing" at the Cheverly community center, an indoor space that we have only recently started using (but that works well for activities).

On March 26 the Key Bridge collapsed, which was huge news in Maryland, as you can imagine. I think I'd driven over it only a couple of times in the decades I've lived in Maryland. Usually I take the tunnels or I travel up the west side of the Baltimore Beltway.

On April 6 I was driving nowhere near Baltimore -- I was heading up to Erie, PA, for a rendezvous with the path of the total solar eclipse. I stayed at my friend Amanda's house -- how lucky for me that she had a guest room! Of course, the big question hanging over the weekend was: would the sky be cloudy? After all, in July 1991, I received a great demonstration of what totality looks like when the sky is overcast. Fortunately, while the morning of April 8 was disappointingly gray, patches of blue sky began to appear on the western horizon, and the crowd (at Mercyhurst University) and I were treated to an awesome sight.

This past weekend (April 13-14) I spent Saturday at Storvik Novice Tournament and Sunday at the Japanese street festival in DC. Storvik had to hold Novice Tourney really early this year because that was the only weekend we could rent the usual site. (This close to DC, sites that allow us to set up all our SCA stuff and have fighting and horses are few indeed.)

At the SCA event, I was excited to be called into court twice: first by Their Majesties, because I won the drawing for a "quest prize," which I will have to explain at another time, and second by Their Excellencies Storvik, who presented me with the Baron's Award of Excellence, which left me truly gobsmacked.

At the festival, the boy toy and I had various types of snacky Asian foods and I bought myself a couple of parasols for use at future SCA events.

I don't quite remember how much of the stove saga I have posted here earlier. Shortly before the covid-19 pandemic began, I got rid of the stove that came with the condo because its oven hadn't worked for years. I bought a new-to-me range at a dicey-looking joint just over the county line. It had a four-month warranty and the oven stopped working at the six-month mark. The appliance repairman wanted $400 to fix it. I had paid something like $250 for the stove.

Our condo maintenance supervisor, Louis, who lives in my building and does odd jobs on the side, had said he'd keep an eye out for perfectly good gas ranges that somebody was going to throw out during remodeling. He snagged a basic Amana model and brought it over here and hooked it up. The guy who gave it to him said everything worked on it, but as it turned out, he'd shorted out the control panel when he tried to replace the light bulb inside the oven.

Louis pointed out that the oven control panel was a self-contained unit that would be easy for us to replace. Armed with the model and serial and part numbers, I ordered a panel from some website called PartSelect and even paid a little extra for faster shipping.

That was the week before Thanksgiving.

Fast forward through weeks and weeks of checking in with the company behind the website and listening to the news about supply-chain delays and semiconductor shortages. I figured that the relatively simple chips inside a replacement part for an aging stove were low down on the foundries' priority list.

Finally, on March 14 (my half-birthday), the part ARRIVED!

I held my breath while the boy toy installed it ... but it fit in its slot perfectly and it WORKS!

It is great to be using a full-size oven again, especially since the gas is covered in the condo fee while the electricity is not. Just today we cooked a big-ass pizza from Lidl for lunch and then the boy toy roasted a half-turkey that's been sitting in the freezer for a while.

Today the SCA is 55 years old. NOT 56 years old -- today is the first day of Anno Societatis LVI, or in other words, the Society is beginning its 56th year of existence. It's come a long way from that very first "international tournament."

And tomorrow is the 40th birthday of the Kingdom of Atlantia! Huzzah and Vivat!!

Today Atlantia actually had a Crown Tournament to choose Heirs!! This is a bigger deal than it normally is because of the pandemic. Normally we have Coronations in April and October and Crown Tourneys in May and November. Our current King and Queen stepped up in April 2020, shortly after the plague hit, and they have served twice as long as they originally signed up for. The Society's board of directors granted a variance for us to have a very lightly attended Crown Tourney -- only the combatants, consorts, and event staff were allowed to be there in person, and the rest of us had to watch on YouTube. Fortunately, the live-streaming technology worked way out there in the middle of rural North Carolina and Atlantians got to see the fighters compete under a gorgeous blue sky. Several of my friends participated in the tech team.

The rest of the SCA's live events are still on hold until the end of May. Storvik will "reopen" the Kingdom with Novice Tourney on the first Saturday of June, but the county authorities are capping our attendance at 50 people, even though the wide-open outdoor site can easily accommodate ten times that number. We shall see what happens. We will have fighting, but not the full complement of activities.

In other news, my church has chosen a developmental minister to stay for a few years and work on our issues and internal drama. Today is the 50th birthday of A.J., the only grandson of my late ex-landlord (he was, what, 21 when I met him?). The boy toy will get his second Pfizer vaccine next Tuesday.

Over and out.

I can't think of any other year when *everyone* wanted to say "good riddance" to the outgoing year. In the past, maybe somebody who lost a job or a marriage or a family member would say "this year sucks," and their friends would nod sympathetically while secretly giving thanks for their promotions and pay raises and kids' college scholarships. But THIS year? When you see chalkboard messages saying "Let us never speak of 2020 again" embedded in the middle of IKEA displays, for crying out loud....

Anyhow, the boy toy and I had a nice Christmas, even though it was just the two of us (and the holiday roast beef came out a little dry, compared with the last time he cooked such a meal -- maybe Easter?). We each got ourselves a new Kindle Fire tablet. The Fire is a little more "locked down" than standard Android tablets, in that you can acquire only the apps that are in Amazon's own app store. However, it's still very easy to use, and I don't care about the app issue so much now that I have a smartphone (though that device is already more than two years old, I think). I was happy with my other presents, including a framed set of retro-style solar-system "tourism" posters and a Hamilton tote bag. On Christmas Eve I phoned my cousins in Massachusetts and then had a much longer phone chat with R.

Till next time....

Today the boy toy and I spent some of our time tearing apart a 24-year-old mattress. It felt good, actually.

My mother bought this King Koil mattress and box spring in the late summer or early fall of 1996. I'm not sure because I was down here in Maryland and she was up there in Massachusetts. I went to see her in October 1996 because she was in and out of the hospital three times that month. She complained that the mattress was thicker/taller than the previous one, which she had put on my bed when she got the new one (both beds were full size). One night while I was up there, when she got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, she fell on her butt and it scared me. After that I made her start sleeping in my bed, and I would sleep in her bed, because I was younger and the extra height didn't bother me.

At the time, she didn't seem hurt from the fall. However, she apparently bled a tiny bit into her spinal column because of her blood thinner. And when she had a spinal anesthetic for a minor procedure a few months later, her legs got paralyzed and her condition spiraled out of control and she died.

When I bought my condo in 1999, I needed only one of the two beds in my childhood home, so I took my bed frame and my mother's King Koil mattress and box spring (because it was so much newer than the other one). I've had it all these years, through weight gains and flings and illnesses and whatnot. Supposedly you're supposed to change your mattress every eight years; this one was three times that age and had all kinds of saggy spots and stains and dust and whatnot. The boy toy and I were tired of waking up with backaches.

Despite the pandemic, we did some shopping ... but oy vey, the prices nowadays. We ended up getting a firm spring mattress from IKEA. I know a lot of people complain about IKEA mattresses, but they do have a partial 25-year warranty, and I am pretty sure it will last for eight years. There's just no way I could have afforded anywhere from $600 to $1800 for a freaking mattress, plus delivery charges. I spent less than $250 on that mattress and it was rolled up so tight that it fit in the back seat of Anna Three (my Corolla).

So far, we have been sleeping very comfortably.

We don't want to keep the old mattress around until the next condo "community dumpster weekend" in November, so today the boy toy got out his box cutter, and we cut off all the cloth and foam on the outer layers and bagged it up for trash. At some point we'll have to borrow a metal-cutting tool for the bare springs.

It served its purpose, but no mattress lasts forever.

1. Today was the boy toy's birthday, so we went out for a drive through the Maryland countryside. We stopped at a combination farm stand and restaurant up in Carroll County (I think). We ate at an indoor restaurant for the first time in months. The booths were socially distanced, the waitress wore a mask made of Baltimore Ravens cloth, and the food was tasty.

2. A whole bunch of people I know also had birthdays today: Mistress Martelle, the founder of my local Toastmasters club, and a woman I worked with in the late 1980s. Also, the current Storvik baroness celebrates her birthday today because she was *really* born on Christmas Day.

3. Last night I finally finished the set of 12 marketeering pieces for the European company. I hope they PAY me now.

4. One of those things that wasn't really a problem before the world changed: Someone accidentally screen-shared erotic fan fiction during a Zoom meeting at work. Oops.

5. All that time in the sunlight today ... I'm getting tired....

On Saturday the boy toy and I cut each other's hair. As I explained in the previous entry, I've been cutting his hair for a while now, but this was the first time he trimmed mine. He ended up taking off about two and a half inches. My hair feels SO much better without all those split ends. It gets much less snarly.

Yesterday I spent three sessions on Zoom: one for my morning church service, one with several friends in lieu of our "sewing weekend" in West Virginia, and one for the first part of our annual church auction. The service was probably the last one to be held in the sanctuary for a few weeks, because of the Maryland governor's stay-at-home executive order today. (Not that we had a lot of people in the sanctuary -- the minister, the pianist, and the minister's husband in the tech-support role.)

The boy toy was out running shopping errands while the news came out about the stay-at-home order, which kicked in at 8 p.m. He really likes to get errands done first thing in the morning, which is fine with me if I do not have to tag along to provide money from my debit card. He had a lot of trouble finding toilet paper and yeast. Now, I am not going to recount all the details of the nationwide shortage of bathroom tissue; I will just point out that he and I bought a pack of 18 "mega rolls" at Lidl just a day or two before the hoarding became noticeable. We still have a few rolls left, but I thought it would be prudent *not* to wait until we are using our last roll before we go shopping for this commodity again. He visited five or six stores (so much for "social distancing") and the only place that had TP (and baking yeast) was our local food co-op. Purchases were limited to two single rolls per visit. Ah, well, we have at least slightly postponed the day when we will need to use scraps of old T-shirts to wipe our butts....

Today I had a massive case of writer's block. I kept reading things online but doing hardly any writing. Maybe this was my brain's way of handling the added stress of this coronavirus crisis.

I may have mentioned in the past that my dishwasher stopped working some years ago, and a couple of years ago, the boy toy and I took advantage of a quarterly "dumpster weekend" in my condo complex to get rid of the dead hulk.

Lately, after 55 years of hanging on the bathroom wall (this building was built circa 1964) and occasionally getting bumped and leaned on, the bathroom sink started to pull away from the wall. Then it developed cracks around the drain hole, and the water rushed out where it wasn't supposed to. I put a basin underneath the sink, but I really didn't want that to become a permanent solution. At best, it was unsightly; at worst, the standing water would start to stink.

So, when I got a large payment on August 30, the boy toy and I hauled our butts to Community Forklift, which just happened to be having a sale on most major appliances AND bathroom fixtures. We'd had our eyes on a bunch of GE Quiet Power dishwashers that looked as if they had been removed from an apartment complex when the owner decided to renovate all the kitchens, just because. They were on sale for $25 each. Yes, $25. And then we found a bathroom sink that was basically the same size and shape as the one we had, only newer, and in an ivory color instead of 1960s yellow (but I did NOT care about being matchy-matchy). That was $25 also. But with the sale discounts, I paid less than $37 including sales tax!

Getting the dishwasher home was the crazy part. The appliance did NOT fit into the trunk of my 1999 Corolla. Not the back seat, either. I thought the boy toy was going to go all Incredible Hunk on me and rip the doors off the car, but we ended up paying another $10 for a ratchet strap to hold the thing partially in the open trunk, and we drove home very slowly.

Back home, we paid our handyman neighbor a couple of hundred bucks (plus about $60 in parts) to install the dishwasher and sink. The plumbing under the sink still has a tiny drip -- we need a new washer (the flat disk thing, not the machine) or something. Otherwise, though, the dishwasher works *perfectly* and *quietly*. When I am sitting at my desk, I can't even hear whether or not that dishwasher is running! I can't believe I paid less than $25 for such a model!

The new bathroom sink is great, too. When the handyman pulled the old sink off the wall, we found that the bracket that was supporting it was literally disintegrating with rust. Really, it looked like part of the wreck of the Titanic. I think the new sink bracket is made of aluminum, so it will hang onto the wall like a champ.

I am happy to spend less time doing dishes. Finally I feel a bit more middle-class! Since the song "Good Lovin'" is on a TV commercial at the moment, my brain keeps wanting to filk it:

Good plumbin'!
(Yeah, baby, I got to have plumbin'!)
Good plumbin'!
(All you need is plumbin'!)

And on and on and on... :-) :-)