Summer of Suck II
by Scott Hardie on May 22, 2021
Science says that complaining is bad for you, but sometimes it helps me feel better, so I'm going to do it anyway. It's my blog and I can cry if I want to.
Summer has arrived and I'm miserable. In the last two weeks, chronologically:
1) My mother is transferring to hospice care. She has been eating less for the last few years -- fuck Alzheimer's -- and now she's barely eating at all. She's under 100 pounds; this was her on Mother's Day. Her health care team advised that it's time for hospice care, and after spending time consulting with family and other doctors, I agree, which I guess is the deciding vote since I'm her health care surrogate. At least she can stay in her apartment in the memory care facility; the hospice team will come to her daily.
2) I have increasingly been unable to do my job any more for a number of reasons; it's a long story. It came to a head last week when my boss said I had to turn things around. I felt like I had no choice but to resign because there were no other openings in the company to which I could transfer, so i consulted with friends who work in HR (not the same company) and put together terms for my resignation. To my relief, my boss refused to accept it, and said he'd work with upper management to invent a new position at the company for me, and he gave me other tasks in the meantime. I'm grateful, but man, it was a nerve-racking few days figuring out how Kelly and I would get by on one income for who knows how long.
3) On Sunday night, our brand-new septic tank decided to back up and flood two bathrooms with sewage. The house smelled as horrible as you're imagining right now. We gave the cats to friends and checked into a hotel until a plumber could fix it and a cleaning service could thoroughly bleach out the gunk. I thought we could at least get the company who installed the tank a few months ago to pay for the damages, but no, the problem turned out to be with the house's plumbing, and the cost is under the annual deductible on our homeowner's insurance. Cool.
4) Just last night, Kelly's good friend Josh passed away suddenly. I never met him, but he was part of a tight circle of friends in Amtgard that talked daily. Kelly had visited him at his home near Chattanooga several times while traveling. He was a big man like me, and apparently his heart just gave out while he was packing to move. He was 32. Kelly and her friends are devastated.
There's more that I'm dealing with on an ongoing basis. If I don't limit myself to the last two weeks, this post will be a lot longer.
I keep writing out how I feel in general these days and then deleting it. The short version is, I'm depressed and overwhelmed and burnt out. I don't have any paid time off remaining at work because I keep spending it to deal with crises. If I take a night off from my responsibilities to rest, my workload just grows that much larger. I keep a few social commitments per week (mostly still video calls with friends), because despite their time cost, they bring me some much-needed joy right now.
I know that these struggles will pass and life will become good again. But after the terrible pandemic year, I was really looking forward to having some fun post-vaccination, and instead things are worse than they've been in a long time. I will keep on going and have patience until things turn around, because I must.
2021 sucks too.
Two Replies to Summer of Suck II
Scott Hardie | May 25, 2021
Thanks, Denise! I get up each morning resolving to have a great day, and sometimes it works, and today was one of those days. Bad times get better one day at a time.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Like That Smash Mouth Song
Dramatic photo of a shuttle docking with the International Space Station, set against the sun: (link) Thanks, Aaron W. Go »Gigantism
Thanks to a friend who couldn't use them, I scored They Might Be Giants tickets to replace the broken Valentines gift that I originally bought for Kelly. We took in the show last night with two other friends who happened to be going, Nathan and Raquel, and it was a great time. Most of my concerts have been metal, so I'm used to screaming and head-banging, and I didn't exactly know how to get into the music, especially since I was the least familiar with the TMBG catalog. Go »Windbag
I don't know what Polaroids he has of whom, but somehow Tom Skilling has elevated himself to some kind of all-important weather-broadcasting god. When I grew up in Chicago, I watched him gradually get a bigger and bigger budget for his animated graphics, and gradually get a larger and larger timeframe to deliver his dull reports. By the time I left town, he had a whole 20 minutes of the hour-long midday newscast for the fucking weather, and boy did he find trivia to fill it: Average dew points across Cook County on this day in 1854, theta-e temperature predictions for every Cubs home game next season, you name it. Go »Scott's Pet Peeve #2519
Why do some microwaves have a convenient quick-start option if you press 1 or 2 or 3, so that they instantly start cooking with 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 on the clock... but DON'T have this same functionality programmed into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, which do nothing when pressed alone? How does an engineer possess both the vision to provide the former and the lack of imagination that results in the latter? Go »Blog Entry Post
Pet peeve: Why do people redundantly call it "tuna fish?" You never hear "parrot bird" or "Cocker spaniel dog." Go »
Denise Sawicki | May 25, 2021
So sorry to hear this. I guess not a good time to say "Happy Birthday" but I really hope you can find some peace today and do something fun.