This is week 84 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This edition was a lost episode that was written later and back-posted just to keep the dates straight.

Sunday (Day 581): Killing Of Piddly Projects

This was going to be a Sunday of getting random things done around the house. I glued a couple of chairs together because sometimes you need to extend the life of things a little bit longer than you expect. I wish I could say that I had broken from being used to tame lions or something, but they were cheap chairs and wore out on their own.

While the chairs set, I went to stare at the bathroom door to figure out why it won’t close all the way. After twenty minutes, the project was involving not only shaving down part of the door, but moving the latch a quarter of an inch. Because it had a high chance of mess and had an unknown chance of success, I dropped the project and moved on.

I grabbed a level, and leveled the fridge because it was so painfully out of square with the kitchen cabinets. A few twists of the ratchet, and I stopped twitching every time I walked through the kitchen. That done, I ran to the basement to see if I had any leftover weatherstripping to stop the cold breeze from constantly blowing under the basement door. I found some, but it was for door edges instead of the bottom. Rather than kluging together something that would fall apart in a few months, I decided to put a door sweep on my list for the next time I went to the local home megastore.

I was running at 50% failure rate, so when #1GF! suggested taking the Christmas tree down, I was all over it. Within fifteen minutes, that sucker was packed into a bin and stored in the attic for the next eleven months. That put my success rate on annoying issues at 60%, which may be a D, but it isn’t a fail.

Happy with getting at least a couple of things done, #1GF! and I sat down to watch The Other Side, which was easily the worst movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. The acting sucked, the story sucked, the effects were crap, and I have no idea how it got in my Netflix queue.

Maybe the previous movie set the bar too low, but we watched Employee of the Month (2004 with Matt Dillon, not 2006 with Dane Cook) afterward. It was a a heist caper with an ending that seemed a little too neatly wrapped up, but it was a decent ride for a Sunday.

After we went to bed, I lay there in the dark reviewing #1GF!’s two weeks off, trying to hit on some of the things that happened. Then I asked, “Do you think we’re weird because we spend so much time together?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said.

“Do other people act like this? Because I don’t know of very many couples who spend this much time together.”

“They probably do, but you don’t ask those kinds of questions.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe there are a lot of content people out there and I just don’t know it. At least I hope there are.

Monday (Day 582): Getting Back To Writing

#1GF! didn’t want coffee, so I decided against making a pot for myself. I can be like a goldfish with coffee. If it’s there, I ingest it. If there is too much, I ingest too much and float to the top of the tank. The last time I made a pot for myself, I ended up starting projects all over the house and moving on before finishing any of them. I also sweated a lot and spoke in gibberish.

I skipped the coffee and ate my cereal. #1GF! went back to work, and so did I. I turned on the PC with a mixture excitement and dread that unemployed people really shouldn’t feel if they’re, well, unemployed.

Like any first day back, I spent the entire morning sifting through and replying to emails that had piled up over the last couple of months. Then, I left a message for the appliance guy, called the mortgage guy to talk about rates, called the kitchen folks to get the final pieces of my kitchen (a couple of toe kicks, a cabinet door, some touch up paint, and the remaining handles) back on their radar.

The kitchen people offered to hire me on as their web guy, which I thought that was pretty nice considering I was willing to do the work for free. Not thirty minutes later, another friend sent me a job posting from his work because they were looking for a web guy. There must be a shortage of web guys (or gals) these days.

Once I was done with the normal calls, I left a message for the plumber. It was after the holidays, and the time that he said that he’d have the money to fix the mistake that he made with our boiler. Even though I was beyond aggravated with the guy, I left him a nice, friendly message that I wanted him to call me back. He didn’t call me back, so I started looking into the process of suing unresponsive professionals who screw you over.

#1GF! came home early because she had gone to the doctor’s for a blood test to confirm her possible pregnancy. She spent the rest of the day working from home. It was nice to have her back, even though she had only been gone a few hours.

I finally sat down to start writing, and roughed out a couple of weeks of LOR before rubbing my eyes and pushing away from my desk. It was freezing in the house, but I hadn’t noticed because I get pretty focused when I write. I had to turn the heat up to 70 degrees to get any heat to flow into most of the rooms. It seemed odd to have to turn the heat up so high in a newly insulated house with a brand new heating system, but nothing in this house surprises me anymore.

At the end of the day, I called the trash company because for the second time in a row they didn’t pick up our recycling. According to the driver, they picked up our bin as scheduled. I told the lady that I was looking out the window at the bin that they supposedly emptied, and it was still full. They said they’d look into it and call me back. They never did.

Am I some sort of fucking asshat that people don’t call back? Seriously? All I’m trying to do is remind people to do their jobs, which, unless I’m your manager, is not something I should have to fucking do. I have these types of discussions with a friend of mine every once in a while where we both end up agreeing that if everyone just Did. Their fucking. Jobs. Things would go a lot smoother for everyone.

Later on, I made #1GF! some dinner and we settled in to watch some shows from the DVR.

Tuesday (Day 583): The Little PC That Couldn’t

I checked my email and went out to do the food shopping. Once I got home and got the groceries put away, I sat down to get some writing done. While I was roughing out one of the lost weeks of Riley, I got a call from the appliance guy. He said that he would sit down during the week and not only fill out our appliance rebates, but mail them in for us.

No kidding.

This guy has been awesome, and if you ever want to buy appliances in Massachusetts, I’d be happy to give you his name. He beat everyone else’s prices by a wide margin, and has gone way beyond his job description for us. That’s the type of stuff that makes me want to do more for other people.

I started writing again and then realized that the garbage company still hadn’t called me back from the day before. I called them, and they said they’d send out a truck with a supervisor to find out why our recycling wasn’t getting picked up. I went back to writing.

At around 2:30, I got a call from my aunt who was having PC issues. Instead of trying to troubleshoot over the phone, I decided it would be faster to just drive over to her house. I was dead wrong.

After three hours of work, I knew only that the system had both malware and O/S issues. The malware was preventing me from downloading any tools and doing any installs, and O/S issues prevented me from booting into anything but safe mode.

#1GF! called and suggested that rather than hold up my relatives all night, I should take the PC home to work on it. She made sense. At home, I could use other PCs to download any tools and updates I needed. I grabbed the troublesome PC and headed home. I love to help, but I hate failing. I hate failing at PC repair worse. My most hated failure is when I fail to resolve a malware related issue because it used to be how I made my living.

I drove home a little frustrated. When I pulled in, #1GF! had put away all the recycling so that I wouldn’t have to do it. Unfortunately, the garbage people were supposed to come back to get it in the morning, so I had to take it back out. It was nice of her to try to save me some work, anyway.

We ate some leftovers and watched a reality show about a woman who took fertility medication and was giving birth to sextuplets. It was absolutely ridiculous. The woman was so big that she couldn’t stand up for more than a couple of minutes. She had to lay on her side all the time, making her look like she should have nipples all down her belly for all of her impending offspring.

Because watching shows like that require some sort of vagina to enjoy, I worked on speed solving my Rubik’s cube. I didn’t do any better than I had been.

The plumber still hadn’t called me back from Monday, and I suggested legal action to #1GF!. She didn’t think it was time, but I have gotten sick of waiting and playing nice with people who aren’t playing nice themselves.

Wednesday (Day 584): The Pond Reclamation And River Diversion Project

#1GF! called at 10AM to tell me that the tests were positive. She was definitely pregnant. Even though we already knew that she was pregnant, having the official confirmation was nice to have. We talked on the phone a bit, feeling incredibly nervous, incredibly lucky, and more than a bit scared.

I sat down to write at 8AM, and went downstairs at 10AM because I had a feeling that the freezing rain might be filling up the window well. I was on the phone with #1GF! when I went down to the basement. I did my best not to cut our conversation short, but the water was flowing in once again.

I hung up the phone, threw on my coat, grabbed a bucket and went out into the freezing rain to bail the window well out, yet again. When I was done, I cleaned up the water from the basement with my stupid robot (see a Life of Riley Week 79 for the robot explanation), and headed upstairs to resume the life of a hobo.

By the time I got back to writing, my hands were bright red and hot as hell. I was having trouble differentiating cold and hot, and my hands tingled as I tic tacked on the keys. It’s was a weird way to type, but the sensation faded as I dove into my writing.

At 1:15, I dragged myself out of my writing long enough to remember the temperamental window of watery death. I jumped up from my chair and ran downstairs to check it out. Sure enough, there were two gentle waterfalls rolling down the window, and my stupid robot was sitting there fast asleep. A small river worked its way past its roller ball feet. “Stupid, stupid robot,” I said.

I grabbed a snow shovel, bucket, and spade, and burst through the bulkhead doors like it was an airlock to the Planet of the Naked Ladies. There were no naked ladies. There was ice, freezing rain, and an Atlantic wind that would not let up.

I took about fifteen gallons of water out of the water well before trying to drain the huge puddle that was supplying the window well with water. I shoveled the water away from the house with a snow shovel, but the drainpipe kept supplying gallons of freezing cold water as fast as I could remove it.

It was time for a change of plan. The shovel was leaning against the brick and practically scoffing at me for using a snow shovel to move water that had not yet frozen into snow. I grabbed the spade and scraped it along the ground to form a slight indentation in the dirt, in the hopes that it would lead the water away from it’s rapidly forming pond. It was as effective as trying to defrost a refrigerator with a butter knife.

It looked like someone before me knew about a drainage issue because I kept finding coarse gravel just under the dirt. I took the shovel and scraped the ground more to reveal a gravel path that led away from the house in exactly the direction that I needed to go to get the water to drain away from the house. I thought back to when we were looking at the house. “Oh this house doesn’t have any water problems that we know of. The basement might get a little damp every now and then, but…”

Uh huh. Right.

After twenty minutes, I had a path of gravel that was slowly leading the water away from the downspout. I still had a pond next to the window well that refused to drain anywhere but into the window well. I scraped another path in the frozen ground to try to drain the pond.

The small rivulet started working, but too slowly to be effective. The drainpipe was still filling the pond faster than it would drain. Even though I had finally diverted some of the water away from the house, the window well was already starting to fill up again.

I stood there in the freezing rain, wondering what I could do. I thought about going to the local home megastore and getting some sand bags to put around the window to keep the water out. Then, I realized that if I wanted sand, there was a beach full of it two minutes away. Then, I got even smarter and realized that my yard was filled with a substance that would act as a sand substitute: sweet, sweet dirt.

Even though #1GF! might not be pleased with having her yard dug up, and routing water to the back of our property might lead to erosion, I needed an immediate way to get the water away from the house. I bounced my shovel off the frozen ground with a sound between a ping and a gong. I had my doubts that this was going to work at all. I stepped on the shovel, and it with a little weight, it pushed right into the frozen ground. Once you get through that inch of frozen ground, the dirt is surprisingly easy to dig up. I was on a roll.

I dug a trench deeper than I should’ve to accommodate the pond draining and river diversion projects, and used the dirt to start a land reclamation project in the pond. I was almost positive that it wasn’t a well thought out idea, but this trench seemed like the only way that I was going to be able to sit at my desk for more than an hour without having a full window well and two tiny waterfalls draining it into my basement.

Another half hour and I was staring at the mud pile where the lake used to be thinking that this was going to be a goddamned mess next spring. The whole yard needed to be dug up anyway, so fuck it. I grabbed the shovels and bucket, rinsed my boots off in the pool forming at the end of the new river I dug, and headed back inside.

The robot was just sitting there staring at the wall. I removed my jacket and I was completely soaked wherever Gor-tex wasn’t. That was about half of me. I wiped off my hands before plugging in the robot to avoid waking up on the basement floor to the smell of burnt hair and human bacon. I vacuumed up the rest of the water, hoping that this would be the last time that I saw a waterfall in the house.

I stripped off my boots and wet clothes, got into an almost identical, but dry, outfit, and headed back to my desk to start writing again.

Before I got started, I looked out the window to see that my recycling was still sitting out front, the cardboard soaked and limp in the rain. I picked up the phone to call the garbage folks to see if they might come to pick it up, but the house phone died on me. I think that the robot might’ve spent my time outside dialing 1900HOTBOTS, but I can’t prove it until the bill comes in. I put the phone down to charge and decided to call the garbage people later.

I had given the plumber two days to call me back, but he hadn’t. I left him yet another message. I tried to sound as nice as possible, telling him that I hoped that he was on vacation and not avoiding my calls again. If he was on vacation, I wondered where the fuck he got the money because he was crying poorhouse the week before.

I wrote for a couple of hours before calling the garbage people again. It was late in the day and they still hadn’t picked up the recycling. They assured me that they would be there by the end of the day. I thanked them and hung up.

I was too irritated to get any writing done, so I started working on my aunt’s PC to channel that aggravation into something positive. For the next three hours, I got pretty much nowhere. The machine was blue screening at startup, and there was some sort of DNS hijacking going on that even hard-coding DNS entries wouldn’t get by. To make things more interesting, the machine would only boot into safe mode, meaning some installs, most deinstalls, and even some programs would not work.

I had planned to make dinner, but #1GF! ended up prepping the whole thing. The way she got me away from the PC was to prep everything and then pretend that she didn’t know how to make the meal. She did, but she later told me that it was the only way that she could think of to get me into the kitchen.

We ate, and I did one round of the Rubik’s cube and found that I had somehow started sucking at it. I kept confusing steps and it took me over ten minutes to solve. I was combating water with mud, had no solution for a PC issue, was slowing down at the Rubik’s Cube, the plumber was avoiding my calls, my recycling had been in front of the house for three days, and the robot may have learned to use the phone. I was not having a very successful day.

Thursday (Day 585): He Sounds Like A Very Nice Man

When I looked out the window, our recycling was still out on the lawn where it had been for the last four days. I just shook my head. I got on the PC by 8 AM, and roughed out another week of LOR.

When the recycling still hadn’t been picked up at noon, I called the trash company again and they said that they’d get someone on it, the same as they had been saying all week. I was finally starting to get annoyed with the situation, and even though I do my best not to be negative with customer service people, my attitude was starting to seep into my conversation. To try to reassure me, the lady read the notes on the file out loud, and they included, “he sounds like a very nice man”. I thought that it was cool that it was on file, but then thought it was a very effective consumer relations trick if it wasn’t.

Because I can’t let go of broken things, I burned the Ultimate Boot CD and kicked off some hardware tests on my aunt’s PC before I went back to writing.

Suddenly, I heard a knock at the door. I walked into the hall to find a guy cupping his hands to look through the windows on my front door. I thought that was a really, really weird thing to do. The guy was from the trash company and was picking up my recycling in a pickup truck. He just wanted to let me know that the driver had been going to the wrong house for a month. He seemed nice enough to be on some sort of consumer relations poster where people in hard hats are smiling and waving.

I thanked the guy and went back to the office to alternate between writing and working on the broken PC. The memory and HDD passed their tests, so the issues were most likely not hardware related. The machine was still blue screening on boot, and no amount of searching was turning up the source of the DNS hijack.

#1GF! called around midday and asked what I was doing.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “Nothing at all. Nope. Just, uh, you know having an orgy.”

“You’re working on that PC, still!?”

“Noooo. I’m, uh, orgying.”

“You need to give up on that thing. If you worked for me…”

“I know, I know. Time limits. But there’s an issue and I can’t find it. It’s driving me nuts and I feel bad returning a PC unfixed. I’m at the point where my only option left is to wipe it down and call a do-over.”

“Do-over.”

“Gah.”

“You need to stop.”

She was right. I tried every trick that I had and every reasonable one I could find, and I was no better off two days later. Smell that? That’s the smell of failure. As a last resort, I tried to shove a service pack down the machine’s throat, hoping that whatever dll was causing the blue screen would get replaced. It didn’t. It was as useful as slapping a new shirt on a corpse.

#1GF! brought home pizza, and I shut the PC off. I unhooked the network cable and brought all the other PCs out of isolation and back online. Maybe it was finally getting out of PC repair mode, or maybe we haven’t had it in a while, but the pizza was an unbelievably perfect reward that I didn’t feel I deserved.

Friday (Day 586): Nice Is So Slow

The alarm dragged me out of a dream that I can’t seem to remember, but I know that I was feeling solid and happy. As the fog cleared, and the pre-dawn darkness filled the room, I realized that I was skinny, bearded and jobless. I wasn’t the awesome guy that I thought I was. I was only me. Waking up seemed like being personally demoted.

I spent the day roughing out more weeks of LOR and listening to random MP3’s from the music collection. I called the plumber and left another message. It was the third message I left this week, and I was less than psyched with the guy, but figured, “OK. Calm down. Maybe he really is on vacation.” Thinking of him on vacation somewhere while he supposedly didn’t have the money to fix my boiler didn’t give me a lot of comfort.

I try to relax and give people leeway, but I can’t tell you how hard some people have made it lately. I just want to tell people to go fuck themselves and set out on the path of bridge burning and earth salting. Then, I calm down and think that it’s no big deal. Everything will work out if you play nice. Resolving conflict works better and faster than escalation and forced submission. Right? Doesn’t it?

I think I got a lot farther when I was at an age where punching someone in the face was an expected reaction to bad behavior. It never won friends, but there was less bullshit to deal with when there was a real threat of getting punched in the fucking face. Fear is an effective motivator for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it also leads to courts and lawyers, and never ending escalation.

So, I play super, super nice. And nice is fucking slow.

I announced on Facebook that I was thinking about getting a job. One friend said that she really thought that it was too bad because she thought that I was on the edge of something big. I thought that was nice of her to say, but I’m tired of wondering where the next dollar is coming from. Being able to throw money into a rope chain with a big gold beard on it just isn’t in the cards right now, and that is totally wack for a pimp like me. Ya heard?

Saturday (Day 587): Delivering Death By Chocolate

#1GF! and I got up and went to the local home megastore to pick up some things for the house, and the place was mobbed with employees handing out flyers, talking to each other, and generally being unhelpful in a larger volume than normal. There seemed to be more employees than customers, and they were even raffling things off. #1GF! and I had somehow wandered into an event, but couldn’t figure out what it was.

We picked up half of what we needed: two blinds instead of four, a small amount of pipe insulation, a sweep for the cellar door, and one towel rack instead of two. We spent $63 and had a gift card with $62 left on it. Out of pocket was only a dollar. That was sort of cool.

We used to have a whole box of Pyrex pans that have gone missing since the move, so we dropped into Home Goods to get a pan. Those stores are pretty useless if you have testicles, and I just followed behind #1GF! holding up various objects that made no damned sense at all and asking her if we could get them. There were metal birds, wooden apples, and a lot of stuff made out of sticks or bamboo.

We walked by the rug aisle, which looked as if the kids who attacked the toy aisles during a Christmas rush in the 70’s had grown up without shedding their childhood shopping habits. Half of the merchandise wasn’t even close to on the shelves. There were two oblivious looking women in the middle of the mess who were ankle deep in leopard and green print rugs, and there was no way I was going down there. After a quick pause, #1GF! decided that neither was she. Leave the psychos to their rug frenzy.

We didn’t have a lot of time to spare because my engineer friend and his wife were going to drop by our house, so we popped into the library to grab a book before heading home. Normally, I could spend quite a bit of time going through their shelves of wondrously outdated ideas, but we didn’t have a lot of time.

I started putting together the dough to make the “death by chocolate” cookies for the engineer’s wife because it was what she was getting for Christmas. The last batch had gone stale before we saw them, so I was going to make her a fresh batch while she waited.

I know. Cookies for Christmas? Yes. It would’ve been so much easier to buy her something, but I knew that these cookies fresh out of the oven would beat anything we could buy. I had the dough prepped and in the fridge pretty quickly, so I had time to clean up the mess before they showed up.

When they arrived, I assumed that they’d be staying, but #1GF! asked them if they were just stopping in. They were. They only had an hour, and had been moving at a pace that suggested that they were staying for the weekend to enjoy our waterfalls, springs, and ocean views. I snapped on the oven, and come hell or high water, they were going to get those cookies in plenty of time before that hour was up.

I wouldn’t let anyone eat the raw dough, which led to a friendly argument, but hey, safety first. I wasn’t giving out cases of salmonella for Christmas. When the cookies came out, I served them up hot. The best way that I can describe the cookies is that they taste like a molten chocolate cake that you make in ramekins. Our friends really seemed to like them. The wife ate more than I expected and took the rest with them. I was told that more were eaten in the car.

#1GF! and I went to the local restaurant for dinner and I had my first cup of coffee in a week. I thought that I would end up bouncing off the roof, but it didn’t offer me any advantage at all. No heightened senses, no ninja reflexes, nothing. It was quite a let down.

We went home and watched American Teen, a documentary that followed a few teens through their senior year in high school. It was an interesting view as a view into a teenager’s mind, but I can’t review it with anything more than a shrug.

After the movie, we sat around watching TV, with #1GF! reading statements out of her pregnancy book to give me a little information on what might be in store in the coming months. Most of the statements were met with “What? Oh, that just sounds gross.” It can’t be easy to be impregnated by one of the most mature men on the planet.

We hopped into bed and I lay there thinking of book ideas before I fell asleep. I ended up having a post apocalyptic dream where I was in a small group of people who knew knew how to survive in a post apocalyptic world. Regular people were asking to join our group and even though I didn’t think it was a good idea, I had a hard time turning them away. I put it to my group who didn’t think it was a good idea either. The people begged, so we let them in. Soon after, the parking garage that we called home was overrun with people. I watched from a distance as they killed each other and set the garage on fire.

I knew we had to move on, so I looked for new supplies. I found a stash of things that had no use in a post apocalyptic world. There were batteries, fans, cameras, and other items that I picked up and then cast away because I ultimately knew that they were useless. I have no idea what this dream meant, but I’m open to interpretations.

What I Learned

• Our boiler is not only wrong, but the heat does not distribute past the first couple of rooms on the loop.
• The plumber has an aversion to calling me back.
• Telling someone that it’s on file that “they sound very nice” is an extremely effective customer service trick.
• They must’ve been aware of the water issues before they sold us this house.
• I learned about 30 day demand letters to tell someone that you intend to sue them.
• I can live without coffee.
• Sometimes nice is really slow.

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