Author: Mark Alexander

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Starting the New Year Fresh

I did it.

I not only deactivated my Facebook account, but I also requested permanent deletion since apparently you can’t actually delete your own account. Fuck you, Facebook.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

I’ve been moving in this direction for some time, deactivating my account periodically for over a year for longer and longer periods. Most recently, it was several weeks. I logged back in a few days ago out of curiosity and discovered it was just as full of stupid as it was when I left.

After one of my friends (who feels the need to comment on everything) left yet another innane comment about something I’d posted on my wall, I said that was enough. It was to kill the account completely.

 

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No.

I’m not doing a year in review. I just want it—and especially the last month—to be over and done with.

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Recommended

To be filed under One of Those Things I Never Thought I’d Want or Need Until I Had One:

I bought one of these for Ben for Christmas, and liked the sound so much I went out yesterday and bought one for myself. Until now I’d been (quietly—open cubes, don’cha know) listening to streaming audio at work through my Air’s speakers to try and drown out some of the inane chatter that comes from the pre-cert nurses on the other side of the cube walls. The sound from the Air was okay and did what it needed to, but once I heard this little beast I knew what I’d been missing.  I don’t know what manner of black magic is being invoked to achieve it, but even at the low volumes I’m forced to listen to at work, this speaker puts out a good amount of bass that makes music sound so much better.

“Professional” reviews can be found here and here.

$70 at your local Targhey…

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Am I Weird?

People have been raving about it, so I went to see The Hobbit yesterday. It wasn’t something that Ben had any desire to see, so I knew it was a film I’d have to go to on my own. Since he was in Phoenix, I took the opportunity and walked down to the train station and jumped on light rail for a ride to the theater.

I never read The Hobbit (Yeah, yeah, I know. How can a teenager of the 70s have not read The Hobbit?), but I loved The Lord of the Rings as well as the Harry Potter films without ever having read their source material either, so I expected to once again be greatly entertained by this journey to Middle Earth.

Sadly, I was not amused. I can’t honestly say I gave a flying fuck about any of the characters, and it seemed to be little more than one pointless CGI creature battle after another. After the mountains finished fighting, I quietly gathered up my belongings and left.

Maybe I missed something in that last half that would’ve awed me and changed my opinion. But the theater was freezing (I had my heavy coat on), I had an hour’s trip home and still needed to get my turkey breast in the oven; all of which seemed more interesting than what I’d seen on the screen thus far.

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Merry Fucking Christmas

Well, tomorrow will mark the second of two Christmases that Ben and I have not spent together, and neither of us is happy about it.

Next year, we’re not going anywhere. If someone wants to be with us during the holidays, they will have to come to Denver.

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A Series of Unfortunate Decisions

Spending a total of about 13 hours on the road Wednesday and Thursday driving back to Denver gave me plenty of time to think about the nightmare that was my trip to Phoenix. While I remain an atheist, I can’t help but wonder if there is still some underlying clockwork in the way the universe works, because I clearly see how Point A led to Point B which led to Point C and so on. (Or maybe it’s only that hindsight is just 20/20.)

About a year ago, when the first bit of freezing weather hit Denver, I noticed that my car had started leaking fluid. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, so I took it into the MINI dealer to have it checked out.

Turns out there were two leaks, as well as a cracked strut mount. Thankfully my Geico mechanical breakdown insurance was willing to cover all three items, but with a separate $250 deductible for each. I didn’t have an extra $750 laying around, so I opted for the strut mount (a safety issue) and the power steering leak—especially after they told me the coolant leak around the thermostat wasn’t that bad, and I’d be fine for a while as long as I kept the reservoir topped off.

Well, the weather warmed up and the coolant leak stopped. I had the car in for service for another matter last summer, and they noted the leak, but also said it didn’t appear to be active—but that it should still be repaired.

First bad decision: choosing to ignore the recommendation when I actually had the money to get that leak fixed.

Of course, once the first freeze hit this year, the leak returned. It wasn’t any worse than it had been previously, so I just kept topping off the reservoir as I had last winter.

Second bad decision: Insisting on driving to Phoenix instead of flying. Ben kept telling me I should fly and just rent a car when I got down there. But I kept thinking that if we were really going to end up moving dad into a group home, that meant going through his house and pulling whatever I wanted to bring back with me and it would be so much easier to just drive it back rather than attempt to ship it.

Third bad decision: only bringing enough of my meds to cover the expected trip duration of five days, and in the flurry of rushed activity that started this whole ordeal, forgetting to pick up a refill of one of the more important ones (going off with only two days worth) before I left.

But other things also seemed to be working behind the scenes in my favor. Even though Geico refused to cover the starter replacement because they said the unrepaired coolant leak contributed to the failure in Phoenix, a week earlier I’d finally gotten around to opening new checking and savings accounts at a local credit union (I’d been using my Phoenix accounts all this time), where I was given a $1000 overdraft line of credit that doesn’t have to be repaid immediately. The final bill for replacing the starter and thermostat came to $950.

And as my very wise friend Cindy said after it seemed storm after storm was rolling through my expected route home, “Maybe this breakdown happened when it did to keep you in Phoenix a few extra days so you don’t end up skidding off an icy mountain road to your death.”

That really got me thinking, and I was finally able to accept the situation. Yeah, I still wasn’t happy about it, and I was losing almost a full week of work (I did have a bit of PTO remaining for the year), but the most important thing in my mind now was to stop bitching about what life had thrown me and simply do whatever was necessary to ensure that I got back to my Ben safely.

On my last day in Phoenix, I was supposed to tour a few facilities with the adult care coordinator my sister was working with, but thankfully he called that morning and had to cancel because of a sick child (“Everyone I know has been down with this horrible stomach bug that keeps you in bed for days.”)

Bullet dodged. The last thing I needed after everything else that had happened was to come down sick.

My sister met up with him the next day.

They located a suitable facility, and Dad is now placed and settled—if not happy—in a group home and is out of the toxic environment he had been living in.


Yes, I had to wear a surgical mask and rubber gloves (not shown) when cleaning out the mobile home. It was that bad.

 

And continuing to keep my personal safety in mind, I decided to take the longer—but sure to be drier—southerly route back to Denver, driving through Tucson and into New Mexico on I-10 to meet up with I-25 in Las Cruces.

Other than running into a dust storm that lasted from outside Deming to north of Las Cruces…

…the entire route (including Raton Pass, which had been a major worry for ice and snow) was uneventful, and for the most part, completely dry.  In fact, by the time I reached Colorado Springs you couldn’t even tell that the snowpocalypse that the fear-mongering Weather Channel had dubbed Draco, had even passed through.

(As an aside, I still say New Mexico needs to change its state motto from Land of Enchantment to Land of Neverending Road Construction.)

And of course, now that I’m home, Ben is about to get on the plane that was supposed to take us to both to Phoenix for Christmas.

But you know what the worst part about all this was? Nothing I did while I was down there could not have waited until next week. Simply put, my sister panicked. I ran two errands to request Dad’s medical records, and I tossed out a huge amount of crap from his mobile home, a job that will fully take weeks—if not months—to complete.

I was greeted with a hero’s welcome—and a BSOD on one of the reception PCs—upon my return to work yesterday, and I can honestly say I never felt so glad to be back.

I can’t say that I am yet ready to fully embrace being Coloradan, but this trip has shown in stark terms that I am no longer an Arizonan. Much like when I was living in San Francisco and returned from visits to Phoenix, the moment I crossed that state line I felt a sense of elation that told me even though many hours remained until I crossed my doorstep, I was finally back home.

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Well, We’re Still All Here

Not only did the world not end, but from the way people were driving and behaving at the mall yesterday, it’s obvious we didn’t even transition to a higher plane of consciousness.

And I was so hoping for rampaging winged beasts, or at least an armada of UFOs.

Stupid Mayans.

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