Today is Teresa’s birthday. On three, everyone say “Happy Birthday!” Ready? 1… 2… 3 HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!! Yeah, that sounded cool. I can feel the love, can you?
So yet another significant day goes by with me out of town.
I am sick today. I started to feel sick Saturday night and it hit me full in the face on Sunday. I had to be up and out the door by 4am this morning. I sounded so awful that Teresa begged me to call in sick and stay in bed. I really do feel like crap but you just don’t call in sick in my job. I’m alone and scheduled for circuit testing (sitting on my ass) this week. It’s not like I have to be coherent to drive or to run these automated tests. If I can pull it off sick, why not?
I have a huge bubble of pain next to my thumb nail. I was working on the house projects this weekend and actually hit my thumb with the hammer just like in all the cartoons. Dumbass. It hurt like hell and swelled up but the worst part was that Teresa was standing next to me and watched it happen. Right down to the part where I yelled. Now you would expect profanities and colorful remarks from me, no? It would be more in character if I did but I didn’t. I let out a high pitched yelp and danced around singing “aieeeaieeeeaiee” like I was doing some strange Mexican hat dance. Teresa laughed at me for twenty minutes.
I trimmed up the door frame around the air conditioner. It needed that for the last ten years. We had some work done on it ten years ago and the door frame was too small. So they tore out the frame and I left it like that. Saturday I bought some 2x4s and some trim and dressed it in nicely. Well, it will look nice after I caulk the small gaps…
I also had to move the big desk out of Becca’s computer room into the dining room so we can store it there until we get the POD storage. It was too wide to put in the room so I had to remove the door and the trim. I also had to remove one side of the door frame. When I finally got it in there we decided that if we ever moved we’d leave it behind but the guy said that it is too large for such a small room and will make the room look small. So I tore the door apart again and moved the behemoth desk. I put the door back together and bought a large can of wood putty to fill the cracks. We really aren’t attached to this thing if anyone wants a large reception style desk. Otherwise I’ll just use it for a workbench in my new garage.
Moving that desk and building a door frame at the air conditioner unit was all Teresa wanted me to get done this weekend. She also wanted a drawing of the house with the room sizes on them but I already had that on file from my college coursework in AutoCAD. I just made the changes to the laundry room and printed it out for her within minutes. I like doing CAD work. I’m good at it and I’m fast. I just wish there was money in it. The little bit of side work I did was nice but that outlet dried up. The market is split between visual and detail. Visual pays crap because there are a dozen decent programs out there that almost any monkey can run and make things look good as long as you don’t need accurate details. The high detail work pays well (after a couple of years) but you have to have an engineering degree. An actual engineering degree, science, math, tolerances, specifications… Not a fake title like “Sanitation Engineer”. It seems anyone can just put “engineer” as their title now a days and almost nobody questions it.
After I dressed up the drawing, I started on packing up the den to get ahead of schedule. I broke down my drums and loosened all the heads. I won’t be able to play them for a few months. I’m a sad, sad monkey… I started tearing up the riser they were sitting on and had to dispose of a couple of critters that had died under there. I remember putting down the poison and I remember the smell when they died. I just never thought about having to clean it up. The milk-crate/plywood/carpet-scrap riser went up as soon as we moved into the house back in 94. I’ve got thirteen years of who-knows-what under the rest of that thing. I only pulled up about a third of it so far. The rest will have to wait until I can move the bookcase that is sitting on it. The milk crates will make handy carrying cases for my books. There are hundreds of them and cardboard boxes just won’t carry the weight. So last night I was sick as hell, almost in tears from breaking down the drum set, dealing with rodent carcasses, and vacuuming up rat poison and rat turds. I start coughing and that’s when I notice that the entire room is clouded with dust. The filter slipped off the vacuum and now I am breathing rat poison, rat turds and mummified rat parts. Good thing the Hanta virus hasn’t migrated to Florida yet (that I know of) or I’d be dead.
Teresa finally talked me into going to bed. Being sick and having to get up early I really had no problem giving in. I just wanted to get ahead of schedule with the packing up and working on the house. I still don’t know when the Puerto Rico job will happen but when it does there may be little to no notice and I’ll be gone two weeks. With all we are trying to get done around the house, I really need to be at home as much as possible. This will ensure that I have to work as far from home as possible and work every Friday/Sunday from here till the end of time. When I didn’t need to be home I was in Jacksonville pretty regular. Now that I need to be around I’m having to travel to Oz and back.
I’d be depressed about it (and a thousand other things that are trying to pull me down) but I don’t have that luxury. I can’t afford the down time of being depressed and sad. I have a million things to get done and the overall picture of how life is going is all but straight up. So all the drag and depression will have to wait until it is more warranted. I don’t know what happened to me with those pills the doctor had me on. I haven’t been on them in a year now and I’m still feeling good. I have those down moments like everyone else and even when I go deep, I handle it differently. I am no longer dangerous to myself or to society… At least not a direct threat… At least not yet…
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