Tag Archives: personal

I don’t mean to be a grouch

life, , ,

copyright 2014 Gene Breshears
These things were piled up in front of the mailbox on our building during the moving process… and left there.
Some neighbors moved out. They lived in the building next door. For many years they patiently enduring living right above Drunk and Drunker, who I’ve written about many times before. Unlike Drunk and Drunker, they were always very nice people: fun to talk to, always sweet & friendly, always helpful, et cetera. So let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Friendly. Mr. and Mrs. Friendly have lived there long enough that we’ve watched their daughter go from enthusiastic grammar school kid, to tween rebel, to sullen teen-ager with sketchy boyfriend.

Mrs Friendly was the neighbor who so very patiently worked with Mr Drunk when he was facing eviction to find a new place to live. Mrs Friendly was also the person who, when Mr Drunk’s relatives were moving him out and their truck drove over one of my flower beds, swept up the smashed decorative light before coming to knock on our door and tell us what happened. Mrs Friendly is the person who, more than a year since Michael and I got married, and a year-and-a-half since voters approved marriage equality in our state, gets teary-eyed when she tells me how very happy she is that we were able to get legally married.

So we were very sad a few weeks ago, while carrying cardboard out to the recycle, when Mrs. Friendly asked if she could have the boxes. Because they were moving out and needed to pack everything up by the end of the month.

Michael and I were miserable sick last week—right at the time that Mr and Mrs Friendly were doing their big move out. I was feeling a little guilty that we didn’t help with the physical move. Though I also figured that keeping our germs to ourselves was probably best. And the one time I actually saw moving going on they had a bunch of people helping. That’s the other thing, so far as I can tell, they did the bulk of their loading of stuff into a truck while I was away at work.

The thing I’ve been grumpy about is the left overs. Such as the pile in the picture at the beginning of this post. Those things were piled up in front of the mailbox on our building (remember, these neighbors don’t live in our building, they live in the building next door) when I got home from work one night. And since over on their building there were piles and piles of furniture and boxes, but no signs of any people at all, I presumed that they had left with a truck full of things and were unloading at the other location. Because our mailbox set is near the shared driveway, I figured those were just things that wouldn’t fit on the truck, and they meant to get them on the next trip.

The pile hasn’t moved for over a week.

There’s a bunch of other things (more ceramic planters with plants in them, a weird shaped metal chair, lots of cardboard boxes) still piled up over on the walkway in front of their apartment. I have since seen one of the owners of that building carrying cleaning supplies into the place. I hope that Mr and Mrs Friendly had a conversation with their landlord about the random left behind items over there.

I realize that the stuff left over by our place could be things that our landlady or one of our neighbors in our building agreed to take care of, and they just haven’t been moved. I can certainly imagine the conversation.

Mrs Friendly: “I have no idea where I’m going to put that in the new place!”

Neighbor1: “I thinks it’s beautiful!”

Mrs Friendly: “Do you want it?”

Neighor1: *looks toward her boyfriend who is in the middle of helping Mr Friendly lift heavy piece of furniture into truck* “What do you think? This could go in the corner of the living room.”

Boyfriend: *finishes pushing piece of furniture into truck* “Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess we could do that…”

And slowly a pile accumulates. By the end of the day, everyone’s too tired to deal with it.

I haven’t actually run into anybody to ask.

And I’m kind of glad, because I’m afraid my annoyance will come through and I’ll sound like an old, unhelpful grouch.

On the other hand, feeling grouchy about that motivated me the other night to trim back my roses. Since spring began, they’ve shot a bunch of branches into the porch and walkway. Some branches were getting out into the driveway. If it was annoying me to have to dodge the branches with big thorns, they must be driving some neighbors well past annoyance.

I completely filled up the yard waste bin with branches chopped from my two roses. Now no one has to dodge them, and I will feel less like I’m hurling stones from inside a glass house if I see a neighbor and ask about the pile of things.

Update: Of course, when I come home from work at the end of the day that this posts, the pile is gone.

I set these goals for the year, see

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CampNaNoWriMo.org
Camp NaNoWriMo is described as NaNoWriMo Lite… but it doesn’t have to be.
When I set my goals for the year, I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving them. Inspired by a friend’s suggestion, I modeled the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.

So let’s see how I’m doing: Continue reading I set these goals for the year, see →

Deadlines motivate me

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CampNaNoWriMo.org
Camp NaNoWriMo is described as NaNoWriMo Lite… but it doesn’t have to be.
I was pleased with how much writing I got done with my Alternate National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and/or being a member of the NaNoWriMo Rebels. But during the months since, I have had a hard time motivating myself to finish several of the missing or not quite finished scenes and chapters in the first draft of my novel, The Trickster Entanglement.

Then I found out my friend, Mark, was going to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I had heard of the Camp, but I hadn’t really known what it was. I thought it might actually me a physical meet-up. The organization that runs NaNoWriMo has sponsored such activities, like the Night of Writing Dangerously, so a weekend retreat or something similar didn’t seem unreasonable.

My impression was wrong. Continue reading Deadlines motivate me →

He’s my guy, and I love him

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Copyright © 2014 Gene Breshears
Michael posing with his Easter basket.
When I first met Michael, I was part of a small group hosting a room party at NorWesCon. He came into the room, gave me a big infectious smile, and said, “Hi! I’m Michael.” Even though more than half the people in our fannish project are introverts, he was a lot quieter than everyone else in the room, coming off as very shy. He had very recently moved to Washington state from Missouri. He didn’t know many people at the convention.

I have to be honest, here, and say it wasn’t love at first sight. He seemed like a really nice guy. I thought he was really good looking, that’s true. My late husband, Ray, was still alive then, and Ray commented (later, when we were cleaning up after the party) that “the new guy, the super shy one from Missouri? He’s cute. Too bad he’s straight.”

Because Michael had mentioned his girlfriend when he was introducing himself.

I didn’t see him again until the next NorWesCon. We here hosting a room party again. For whatever reason, that year the room party (our room parties were always more like a writers’ group or artists’ jam than a party—for one thing, we didn’t serve alcohol) was more crowded and busy. And the shy guy from Missouri showed up again… except he didn’t come off as shy that year. He’d grown his hair out, he was much more outgoing. And he managed to mention the fact that he worked as a bartender at a gay bar a couple times.

But the first thing he said to me when coming into the room was once again, “Hi! I’m Michael.”

A couple months later, a new season of the British science fiction comedy, Red Dwarf, premiered in the U.S. with marathons on PBS stations. Ray and I hosted a watching party, which we had announced on a couple of fannish e-mail lists. And once again, when I opened the door, I got that irresistible smile and he said, “Hi! I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Michael.”

That was the last time he introduced himself to me. He hung out at the party (which got pretty crowded), and since he’d taken a bus up to Seattle from Tacoma, and the party went a bit longer than he had anticipated, he wound up crashing on our couch. By the next day he and Ray had bonded as if they had been friends for years. We gave him a ride back to Tacoma after we found out how long the bus ride would be.

He and Ray started corresponding online after that. So several weeks later, on a Friday night when Ray picked me up after work because we were going to go out, Ray said, “I think we should drive to Tacoma and surprise Michael at work.” We had a great time hanging out and meeting the regulars at the small lesbian bar where Michael was a bartender.

It got to be a fairly regular thing, where Michael would take the bus to Seattle on a day off (which were usually in the middle of the week) and meet up with Ray, or we’d go to Tacoma to meet up with Michael. Ray had had his first round of chemotherapy by then, and was no longer working. I was grateful that someone was available to hang out with Ray at least some of the times when I was at work.

He was a great friend.

And then, not long after the second round of chemotherapy (the first one had appeared to help a lot, but it hadn’t gotten everything), Ray had a seizure in the middle of the night and fell into a coma. Michael wasn’t able to make it to Seattle before Ray died.

Michael was one of a rather vast group of people who helped me deal with the aftermath of Ray’s death.

I have another confession to make. I don’t remember when I fell in love with Michael. There’s a lot during that first few months after Ray died that is very fuzzy and confused for me. I remember Michael meeting me a couple of days before Christmas to give me a Christmas present and to tell me he hoped I managed to have a good holiday at my mom’s, even though I wasn’t in a holiday mood at all that year. One of my favorite pictures of Michael was taken that holiday season in my living room, next to the Christmas tree that I almost didn’t even put up (except I had a frantic moment where I became convinced that Ray would be upset at me if I didn’t put up at least a little bit of Christmas; which was followed by a bigger panic when I thought about digging into all our Christmas stuff in the basement because I knew I would start crying and never stop, so I bought new decorations that didn’t have any memories with Ray attached to them). I don’t remember that visit at all. For various reasons, I know I didn’t take the picture that time he came up just before Christmas, but I don’t recall the visit where I took his picture.

Somewhere during all that upheaval, I realized I had fallen for him. We had one awkward week where I thought that maybe he was spending so much time with me because he felt obligated because I was grieving, so I tried extra hard not to do anything that might be considered flirty or otherwise showing that kind of interest in him. And he took my sudden emotional reticence as a signal, and he worried that the earlier signs of interest had actually been because he was taking advantage of me when I was in a fragile state. So he tried extra hard just be be a friend and nothing more. Which I interpreted as a sign that he really was not at all interested. And so on, and so on. It was like the middle act of a romantic comedy for a bit there.

But eventually I asked him out on a date. And he said, “yes.”

It was soon enough after Ray’s death that I was more than a bit nervous about how some of my other friends would react to the news that I was dating someone already. I was incredible relieved when I told Kristin, and her reaction was to grin, make a little victory motion with her hands and say, “I hoped something like that was happening! He lights up whenever you come into the room!”

Sometime long after that, he overheard me explaining to someone why I never called him Mike. “Because every time he introduced himself to me, he said, ‘Hi! I’m Michael.'” He interrupted to say that wasn’t true. So the next several times I heard him answer the phone with, “Hello, this is Michael” or saw him introduce himself to someone at writers’ night or a convention committee meeting by saying, “I’m Michael” I would catch his eye and mouth silently, “Hi, I’m Michael.”

A lot has happened since first meeting him at a science fiction convention in 1996. I could go on and on with stories about what a wonderful man he is. I know that over that time, to the extent that I have become a better person, it’s because of Michael. He’s wonderful, smart, capable, kind, unselfish, funny, and constantly helping people. He laughs easily, and he always finds ways to make other people laugh or feel better. I often suspect that most of our friends only put up with me because my weird opinions and annoying quirks are a small price to pay compared to how awesome Michael is.

And I’m okay with that, because he is so darn awesome. And I’m not just saying it because it’s his birthday.

I have one more confession to make. When I started writing this post, I titled it, “He’s my guy.” But that isn’t true. I could never “have” a man as incredibly talented, sexy, warm, loving, kind, smart, giving, compassionate, practical, unwaveringly cheerful even when he’s being cynical, unselfish, funny, charitable, or just plain incredible as Michael.

He’s not mine. I’m his.

Happy Birthday, Michael. You deserve to have the happiest and most wonderful day all of the time, but especially today.

If we sits…

life, ,

copyright © 2014 Gene Bresheas
New couch is flat black, so not easy to see, here.
We bought a new couch this weekend. Our old couch was a queen-sized inner spring futon mattress on a couch frame. Michael picked it out mid-2001 after putting off replacing the old hand-me-down couch Ray and I had owned for who knows how long. We went with the futon because some friends had recently purchased an inner-spring futon mattress for one of their guest rooms, and it was one of the most comfy couches I had sat on.

The first several years we had the futon, it was a nice, comfy couch. It has become less and less so since.

So we’ve been overdue to replace it, and as these sorts of household chores can go, we just kept forgetting and procrastinating. Finally on Sunday we managed to get done with laundry and other things in time to head up to a store that sells these things and get there before closing time. It didn’t take us long to pick one out, though we did have to hurry to drive down to the warehouse near the U-village to actually pick up the futon. It’s amazing how tiny (comparatively) they can package these things thanks to vacuum shrink-wrapping.

The model we got is a flat black with microfiber outer shell. We also ordered a custom cover, which will be a plush violet when it arrives. For now it doesn’t look terribly interesting, but it feels really nice to sit on.

We skipped NorWesCon

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Some of my bestest friends hanging out at the convention this year. I didn't take this picture, because I wasn't there.
Some of my bestest friends hanging out at the convention this year. I didn’t take this picture, because I wasn’t there.
So we didn’t go to the Northwest Science Fiction (NorWesCon) again this year. Quick background: I started attending the convention back in 1987, after being envious of friends who attended the previous few years, and I didn’t miss a single one for the next 25 years. Michael and I met at a NorWesCon. For years he has referred to NorWesCon as our anniversary, since neither of us can ever remember the date of our Commitment Ceremony (of course, both have been superseded since we were able to finally legally marry on December 9, 2012). For a couple of decades it was my habit to buy our memberships for the next year before we left the convention.

Since NorWesCon has been on Easter weekend since 1989, I have kept track of Easter by remembering when NorWesCon is going to be. I have habits built around NorWesCon. For many years, now, I spent a lot of time during the rest of the year plotting what new cocktail I will buy Keith on Saturday night at the con, because Keith almost never drinks, and it amuses all of us, including his wife, to watch him react to alcohol (and it’s tricky to find ones he will actually agree to drink more of). During the weeks leading up to the convention I start longing for the evening I’ll sit in the bar or restaurant with Juli-sans-e (not to be confused with Julie-with-an-e, who might join us with the wings, but is more likely to find ways to trick us into saying “nipple” at inappropriate times) eating plate after plate of hot wings and exchanging stories.

I could go on and on.

But, for a variety of reasons, the last few NorWesCons we attended were not much fun for either Michael or myself. And when I realized that four out of the last five we attended, I had found virtually none of the programming interesting (except for Auntie’s costuming panels). I had found it so unappealing, that I had wound up spending all of the time I wasn’t sitting in a bar or restaurant with our friends, sitting at my laptop writing.

To be fair, I got a lot of writing done each of those conventions. More than I usually get done on an ordinary weekend. But it seemed a little silly to both of us the spend all that money on a hotel room, memberships, and all of those meals at hotel restaurants, if all I was going to do was sit in a hotel room tapping away on my computer keyboard.

The one exception out of that span was the year that both Jim Butcher and Patricia McKillip were guests of honor. It’s pretty difficult for me not to enjoy hearing either of them talk about their writing.

So we skipped last year. We gave a few other local conventions we haven’t attended in a long time a try, and we enjoyed those. We would have enjoyed them more if our usual gang had been in attendance. I did miss hot wings with Juli. I really missed hanging out with the gang.

We were leaning toward coming back this year, but when we weren’t able to get certain answers we needed before the hotel room block filled up, we decided to skip again.

As it happens, another friend that I’ve been trying to get to attend finally went for the first time this year. So not only didn’t I hang out with our usual crowd and do our usual things, I didn’t get to hang out with Sheryl at the con.

I also regret missing this year because Michael Moorcock was Guest of Honor. I really like his writing, and given his age and the distance to travel to a west coast con, it’s highly unlikely I’ll get another chance to see him.

NorWesCon is almost always the same weekend as SakuraCon. My dear sweet husband was actually one of the founding SakuraCon committee members many many years ago. It’s been several years since we’ve attended it. So we had talked about the possibility of getting memberships to SakuraCon for this year, though by the time we had decided not to do NorWesCon, neither of us was feeling enthusiastic about anything. We had a couple of conversations this weekend about next year attending either SakuraCon or NorWesCon. I know we could both have fun at either. Most of our friends will be at NorWesCon, but we’ll have a few friends at SakuraCon.

A lot of people seem to be excited because George R.R. Martin is going to be the Guest of Honor at NorWesCon next year. Frankly, that makes me slightly less likely to attend. Not that I have anything against Mr Martin, it’s just that I suspect a lot of people who don’t normally attend fan-run conventions will decide to attend this one because of the television version of Game of Thrones, and the atmosphere may be more like a corporate con than a fan con. Yes, sometimes I am a fan-snob.

We need to decide soon enough that we can get the hotel rooms and everything else in order either way.

In related news, thanks to some suggestions from friends, since we were already planning to attend EverfreeNW again this summer, but we’ll stay at the hotel next door that many of us like a lot better, and since that same weekend a gaming convention, PaizoCon will be happening in that next door hotel, Michael and I now have memberships for both conventions, the same weekend. And several of our friends are doing the same. So, we’re going to be two-fisted congoers (or dual-weilding badge-holders, or something) this July.

So even though we’ve skipped NorWesCon two years in a row, I think we’re holding onto our geek/nerd/fanboy cred.

Rinse, don’t wash

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goantiques.com
This is really close…
One of my grandfathers had a coffee mug that was “his” mug. No one else used Grandpa’s mug. It was a yellow mug, but not a really bright yellow. Very similar to the one pictured here.

It was nearly identical in shape to a set of sage green and brown mugs that matched grandma’s everyday plates. That particular shape of stackable coffee mug was very popular when I was a kid. My other grandparents had a set that was very similar in a dark blue—though the bottom, narrow section of the mug was a little taller. And my parents had a set that was a darker, brownish-yellow than grandpa’s, was a gradient of the dark yellow at the top of the mug, becoming dark chocolate brown by the bottom. I remember seeing similar mugs at the homes of many friends.

etsy.com
This set is very similar to my other grandparent’s set, though theirs were all one color, and the blue was a different shade.
But, as I said, Grandpa’s mug was different. It was only for Grandpa to use. No one got yelled at if you used Grandpa’s mug by mistake, it was just someone would say, “You can’t use Grandpa’s cup!” or something. Grandpa would laugh if someone else used it. He’d say something like, “Just tell me you didn’t put it in the dishwasher! Never wash my coffee cup, only rinse it!”

Continue reading Rinse, don’t wash →

A 70-year nap sounds tempting

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We saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier with a bunch of friends Saturday, and it was fun. If you liked the 2011 Captain America movie, or The Avengers you’ll probably like this, as well. I thought it was awesome. I confess I’d been a teeny bit worried because I liked the previous movie a lot, and that one got so much of its appeal from the 1940s setting; I was afraid they’d try to grit Cap up and ruin him. They didn’t. The story has plenty of darkness, but the script and Chris Evans make you believe someone can face that darkness, fight it, and come out with an old-fashioned sense of honor and justice intact.

A major part of Captain America’s story is that he is a man out of his time because survived being frozen for 70 years after crashing that doomsday plane at the end of the first movie to save the world. Lately, I’ve been thinking a 70 year long nap might be a good thing.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure out why I’ve been tired all the time. When we were both suffering from the Martian Flu it made perfect sense why we were tired, taking frequent naps, and so on. But it’s been about a month since either of us had symptoms, yet almost every week night since, I have to take at least a short nap after getting home. And at least once a week I conk out for several hours, only to wake up just in time for bed time!

Part of it is that with heavy pollen season underway, I frequently have severe enough hay fever that I’m not sleeping very well at night. But the other thing is just that while we were sick I let my sleep schedule go to whatever it wanted. If left to my own devices, my body likes to stay up until about 3am or 4am, then sleep until noon. It’s just the way my diurnal cycle is wired. I haven’t managed to land a job that lets me work that schedule (and still pay the bills plus give me the sorts of mental challenges to keep me from being bored), so once I finally accepted that this is what the neurochemicals are going to try to do, I realized the rest of my professional life would be a battle to keep the sleep schedule from drifting to default.

This means that I can’t let myself stay up as late as I want on weekends, as tempting as it it. And it also means that about once a week I have to take a melatonin tablet at about 10:30 or 11pm, lay down, and trick my brain into sticking to a sleep schedule compatible with work.

I haven’t done that in months. And I’ve been staying up way to late working on writing projects on the weekends.

So, I need to hammer the neuroreceptors with some melatonin. I’ll probably need to do it a couple of nights in a row to make any progress. Unfortunately, that means I have to both remember to do it, and be awake at the right time in the evening to take the pill. Which I haven’t managed to do since having the realization.

I’d like to stop having these random nap attacks. So I need to get this done.

Never thought I’d be happy to do the taxes

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Us, at our reception.
It isn’t primarily about the legal stuff, of course. Except when it is.
The last few years our taxes have been very unpleasant. When Washington state voters approved the “everything-but-marriage” domestic partnership referendum a few years ago, our separate incomes became community property. The so-called Defense of Marriage Act forbade the federal government from recognizing our relationship, except that other parts of the tax code (voted in by the same congress critters who passed DOMA) required that anything which your home state considered community property had to be taxed as jointly owned property.

The upshot was that we had to file extra forms, but none of the forms that existed had places for folks in our situation to list the name or social security number of our partner. The first year that was the case, the IRS didn’t properly inform their own people, so same sex couples in the relevant states who filed early had their returns rejected and received letters threatening fines and penalties.

That got straightened out quickly, but the IRS never put out comprehensive instructions for taxpayers in our situation. Even after three years. Everyone was having to refer to one article from a gay rights lawyer posted on the web that walked you through all the different IRS publications—a few rules from this publication, the form from that, and these instructions from this other one. Yes, even the tax professionals were referring to that site.

It was a mess. And we weren’t even allowed to mail our separate filings in the same envelope.

Continue reading Never thought I’d be happy to do the taxes →

Why I hate hay fever reason number 5871, plus 4312 & 3786 & 3113 & 2488 & 2149, and don’t forget number 1364

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icanhascheezburger.come
Except I’m too grumpy to remember to say please.
Because I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo, I had sworn that I wouldn’t post blog updates on the weekend, using all of that time to write. But this morning’s hay fever misery is too overwhelming.

Yesterday wasn’t too bad. I had to take over-the-counter meds in addition to my prescribed allergy pills to keep things to a point where I was mildly uncomfortable all day while hanging out with friends and working on editorial tasks (and later to go with said friends to see the Captain America movie). But about 11:30 or so last night, the headache and itchy eyes got much, much worse. I took some more meds and tried to sleep, but couldn’t get beyond dozing until sometime around 5 in the morning.

I crawled out of bed today, head and eyes still too miserable for words, and just wishing that I could destroy every last plant on the entire frickin’ planet. With fire.