Sunset

Packed?

1/24/02

The "packers" are coming in a few hours--I feel much like a sardine.  My spare living space is now filled with cardboard boxes--brown never featured much in my decorating scheme, and it's now very clear why.  My office has resisted organization.  I fear it will come to making a few big boxes and throwing in everything that is not nailed down.

More to the point for this entry, the computer will be shut off, and with it my hateful experience with 2-way satellite Internet access.  I won't miss the flakiness that the extra delays seems to induce in browsers and other programs that think they are on the net.  I may miss the bandwidth, especially incoming.  And I won't miss "dealing with" my supplier, if you can call a relationship that involves hours on hold a "relationship".  I'm dreading calling them to cancel my service, since I suspect it will be forever before I get to talk to anybody...

I promised an entry about the house in Mass.  It's a colonial (duh!  it seems to be a state law or something that you can't live and sleep on the same level).  It's got enough space for the four of us, and, if Diana's parents decide to come East, we can fit them in with some juggling.  The boys came with us on an incredibly intense three day house finding mission, and it was good to have them along.

Diana's ex husband is making trouble--it will be wonderful to have him a continent away.  He is clearly upset that the boys are going.  We sent him some email suggesting that he remove the stuff Diana had stored for him, without so much as a "thank you", in a shed in the back yard, and giving him a deadline.  A few hours before the deadline, he appeared, took all the stuff out of the shed and spread it throughout the back yard.  Some of it had water damage, some of it had been inhabited by mice.  He selected a few boxes of stuff (by this time it was raining), left the rest in the back yard, and left, leaving a godawful mess, and leaving his "no thank you's" policy intact.  The boys had helped him in this adventure, and then came into the house and seemed very depressed.  We tried to get them to help us clean up the mess, but they pleaded exhaustion.

Come to find out, he told the boys that he had been having chest pains, and managed to get the boys to feel that they would never see him again.  Far be it from him to do anything sensible about the chest pains, of course.  Martyrdom is tarnished by actually taking constructive action--it is necessary to nurture victimhood.  That man has made irresponsibility into an art form.

What never ceases to amaze me about his actions is that he is so much my shadow.  Where I am responsible, he is irresponsible.  Where I suck it up and do what needs to be done, he whines and complains.  Where I talk to the boys about their life choices and try to model problem solving behavior, he spends the weekend playing video games with them.  I don't know how Diana can have been married to us both.

Actually, in her garage, when we were in high excavation mode, what should appear than a framed picture of Diana and him, taken during the first few years of their marriage.  She looks amazingly the same--25 years have touched her very lightly.  Her face has a bit more "character" now.  But I'd never recognize him.  He actually looks like a nice guy in that picture, like someone I might have known, have enjoyed knowing.  The effects of alcohol and depression and whatever else is going on in him have marked him heavily.  God's rubber stamp--LOSER--on his body.  He is really my shadow...

So we stopped by the county seat so Diana could get a stamped copy of her birth certificate.  An amazingly complicated set of buildings, all devoid of any signs, and with an information booth that is untended.  Finally found the right place, plunked down our $$, and the clerk took a CD from a rack, put it on her computer, and voila, we had a birth certificate, or, as they so quaintly put it, a "Live Birth" certificate.  I was certainly happy that Diana was live at birth--she hasn't slowed down much since then.

This has been wonderful, but now it's time to pack up this trusty Sony for a month and finish the packing.  I'll update on my laptop, or whatever I'm able to do, but it will probably be another 2 months before I fall into any kind of frequency worth the name of journaling...

Thank you for reading.

Copyright © 2001 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.

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