This is week 104 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 week marks a full two years without a boss.

Sunday (Day 721): Stained Glass Cake, Pixie Stix, & Raleigh Good Robot Friends

The first thing I did when I got out of bed was to make two kinds of Jell-o. It’s the kind of random thing that unemployed people do so that they have something to eat while they’re sitting on the couch watching Jerry Springer with their imaginary robot friend. The jello is also good to have on hand as a distraction in case anyone randomly shows up and points out that they’re sitting on the couch with a shop vac that seems to have a mullet wig and fake mustache glued to it. Nothing distracts from being caught in a strange situation like the jiggle and shimmy of Jell-o.

Seriously? You’re not buying what I’ve got on the counter because you know the real stuff is in the glass case, right? You know I don’t watch TV during the day, and that the robot isn’t allowed up on the couch, anyway. I had to start the Jell-o the first thing after I got up because it was part of a stained glass cake that I was going to make for a dinner we were going to. Once the Jell-o was in the pans and in the fridge, I set the refrigerator on “Turbo Cool” (no, that’s true), and made breakfast for #1GF!.

#1GF! had been concerned that we were running out of time to get things set up for the baby, so I was working on getting the contents of three rooms rotated to put her at ease. The office had already been moved, so the next thing that had to happen was to move the den into the former office, and all the accumulated baby items into the former den.

The process was a one man job, with the exception of an eight foot sleeper sofa that would be easier with two. I hadn’t lined up any help yet, so I decided to start prepping the couch to get it through the tight doorways without the use of Jell-o or Jell-o related lubricants.

I went into the old office and took half of the CDs off of a rather large CD rack to make it light enough to move away from the door. It wasn’t really in the way, but I knew if I didn’t move it, I’d somehow ram the couch into it and be crunching through CD cases and picking up plastic splinters for months. Once the CD rack was halfway to it’s temporary location, I realized that I needed to get a bookcase out of the way so that there was enough room. I took all of the books off of the bookcase and piled them on the floor, just as I had done with the CDs. I had piles of books and CDs all over the room.

Now these were only temporary moves to get the two racks out of the way so that the couch would make it through the door. I’d have to repeat the same process later to put them back once the couch was in. It was not the most efficient scheme I’ve ever come up with.

I moved the bookcase about a foot, and put the books back. Then, I moved the CD rack, and put all the CDs back. It seemed like a waste of time, but I was like a ginormous defragger moving blocks into temporary places around the room until I could move them into more efficient locations.

Just before noon, I returned to the kitchen and used the Jell-o to make a the stained glass cake. The refrigerator set up the cake in six hours instead of eight, and I’m not sure whether the Turbo button had anything to do with it (In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a useful turbo button since the early days of computing). A few hours later, the recipe came out of Cook’s Country, and I have to say it looked pretty cool when it was put together.

I got dressed and we went over to #1GF!’s mother’s house to check on her while the cake set up. She seemed to be doing Ok, but within ten minutes of us getting in her house, it started pouring and then hailing, with huge rain drops and half inch pieces of hail. Half #1GF!’s mother’s lawn ended up under water, and the rain was almost up to the running boards on the truck, which was parked in the street. A river of water ran by the side of the house on its way to who knows where.

#1GF! wanted me to go outside in the hail and wade through the calf deep water to move the truck before the rain swept the truck down a storm sewer. The water wasn’t quite up to the running boards, and the truck wasn’t going anywhere, so I politely refused a number of times. That’s why you have a truck: so you can get through large amounts of snow and water and not worry about it. Eventually the water receded as the storm drains caught up with the volume of water. I had never seen that amount of water rise so quickly without a hurricane warning.

Once the water receded, we walked through the silt, and headed home. I sat on the couch listening to n01a’s CD Challenge submission, and thought about how cool it is to be able to correspond with people from all over the world through the ol’ blog. Writing certainly isn’t the most lucrative job in the world, but the soft payments are pretty cool.

Later, #1GF! and I hopped back in the truck to bring the stained glass cake over to our friends’ house as desert. We’re not in the habit of transporting cakes, so we don’t have a cake plate or one of those plastic cake boxes to keep cakes safe in the car. I had already taken the cake out of the spring form pan, so the best we could do was to put it on a platter and have me hold it in my lap. I was the suspension system for the cake, and I almost lost it a couple of times during braking and around certain corners.

Even though I was sure that people would be spooning what was left of the eight hour jello cake off my shirt upon arrival, the cake made it in one piece. We were also charged with bringing a game, which is never a problem for me.

You never can tell how many people will actually be at our friends’ house for dinner because of their social nature and the friendly nature of their college-age daughters. I wanted to bring Pandemic because of it’s kick ass gameplay, but there was no way that there would only be four people at dinner. It was an impossibility. I reluctantly left Pandemic behind and brought three games to cover all crowd sizes. I brought one game for five players (Ticket to Ride), one for eight (Last Word), and one for unlimited players (Beyond Balderdash).

There ended up being eight people at dinner, so Ticket to Ride had to be shelved in favor of Last Word. Last Word is a party game where a subject and a letter card are played, and the last player to blurt out an answer when the random timer stops gets a point. There was a lot of blurting, and it turned out to be relatively fun.

After the game, the stained glass cake was served. I wasn’t sure how the cake would go over, but it at least had an interest factor that loomed over a plain chocolate cake. It had a graham cracker crust, and was essentially colored Jell-o cubes suspended in a pineapple cream. When jello is the base, I am instantly biased to believe that the dessert can’t be that good. Even though it took about eight hours to put together, it was still Jell-o. It seemed as good as ambrosia salad, but with a more interesting presentation and a lot more effort. I don’t know if I’ll make it again, although #1GF! said that I should when something interesting and light is needed.

At one point during dessert, one of the college-age daughters described something as “Raleigh good”. I can’t quite remember what it was, but it wasn’t the cake. My brain instantly spun up to process this new adjective that sounded like it might share the meaning, but not the fun factor of “redonlkulous”.

I’m not the hippest guy in the world, but had North Carolina become some sort of symbol of quality for the new generation? Clothing stores these days are filled with half naked male models to attract dudes in to shop (go figure), and those dudes not only regularly wear flip flops, but wear them with jeans. And skaters wear skinny girl jeans instead of big pants. Anything was possible with the damned kids today.

I drifted away from the processing for a half second and wished that I had a nice wool hat to keep my brain warmed up enough to translate these kids new trendy words. As I longed for a nice hot cup of tea to drink while yelling at the TV, “NOT IN THERE, MATLOCK!”, my mind slowed down even further and stopped trying to translate. It suddenly clicked that “Raleigh” was simply “really”. This mental excursion took approximately three seconds to complete. Sometimes, it’s not fun up here in this mind of mine.

I rolled my eyes.

Suddenly, a college friend of the other daughter chastised me for comparing her friend’s offer of a half eaten Pixie stick to the offer of a partially used band aid (see LOR week 55, day 384). That led to a discussion on practice of sharing water bottles, which made me think that this generation should start a Walk for Herpes event to benefit herpes research. They can all walk in their flip flops and jeans, and have only one water bottle that they can pass and refill. I may or may not donate to their cause, depending on what the Angela Lansbury Fan Club newsletter or Reader’s Digest tells me to think of the whole event.

This led to a small discussion about my blog, and one of the girl’s boyfriend’s did a double take when they said I had a blog. I didn’t want to look at him directly to acknowledge the double take because I wasn’t sure if it was “Holy shit, the old guy not only knows what a blog is, but he has one” or “Did your blog evolve out of the fuzzy locked diary that you’ve kept under your bed since you were a little girl?”. No matter what the meaning, I thought the reaction was pretty funny.

I didn’t seem to be scoring any points with the 18-25 demographic, so when one of the ladies said, “It’s like the Transformers movie. I mean, who didn’t like that?”, I raised my hand, and was met with a sea of wide eyes. You would’ve thought I had called Polaner All-Fruit “jelly”, or walked into Abercrombie & Fitch and said, “You know what? Fuck flip flops. I mean it. Fuck ‘em. My toes need a home.”

I was unapologetically losing ground. I watched Transformers cartoons when I was a kid, and while I appreciate Michael Bay’s addiction to big action, the Transformers movie was a pile of suckbots in disguise. Big Time. It sucked almost as much as flip flops, and we all know my feelings on that subject.

Monday (Day 722): Bizarro House

#1GF! got up in the middle of the night, and the first words I heard in the dark were, “Jon, something’s wrong.” It was not something that you want to hear your baby mama say, and definitely not something you want to be woken up with.

She followed it up by assuring me that she just didn’t feel that great and was going to sit on the couch and watch TV until she felt better. She didn’t want me to get up with her, so once I was convinced that there was nothing major wrong, I went back to sleep. She was on the couch for at least a couple of hours watching home improvement shows.

It was a Memorial Day, so #1GF! was home for the day. When she went into the shower, I broke down the den and took pictures of all the wires connecting the TV to the stereo. After a bit of thinking and measuring, I managed to move the eight foot sleeper sofa into the hall by myself. I tried to move it into the new den, but I couldn’t get enough leverage to get it through the door without risking the destruction of a wall if I slipped.

I set the sofa down in the hall and moved it when #1GF! opened the bathroom door to get out. She seemed surprised and impressed. Maybe not with my brawn, but with my brains. The sofa was in the hall and there were no new scratches on the woodwork.

I left the sofa in the hall, and cleaned half of the bathroom. I think it was still before 10AM. I got a call that our friends (who we had dinner with the night before) would be coming by to help move the couch, so I didn’t have time for the tub or floor. Once the cavalry arrived, the men moved the sofa into the new den in less than ten minutes without a scratch. The two of us moved the couch when #1GF! and I moved in, but I have no idea why we had such a hard time with it. Maybe we were tired back then. Once the couch was in, we moved the old TV.

The four of us went for a walk on the beach because the weather was really nice for a Spring day. Despite Spring like temperatures, the beach was packed with people itching to start soaking in the summer sun. We walked a few miles, and then picked up lunch at a local sub shop. We ate at the house, and our friends left to go start their own projects.

I got a call from them later saying that their daughter couldn’t get on the internet. I had connected the laptop up to their access point the night before, so I didn’t know what could’ve gone wrong overnight. I left the daughter a message, but she never called back. I don’t know if the problem got resolved or not. I Raleigh don’t.

I shrugged, and went back to rotating our rooms. I took half the CDs back out of the CD rack, and moved the rack back into place, and then removed the books from the bookcase and moved it into the baby’s room. It isn’t ideal to have the bookcase in there, but we had no other place to put it. And really, any child of mine should have access to Perl books as soon as possible.

I moved the crib and baby stuff we’ve collected into the baby’s room, and then hooked up the TV in the new den. The den wasn’t an ideal setup (the speakers of my stereo are barely six feet apart, too close to the wall, and not properly toed in), but it certainly seemed comfy enough. I hung a couple of doors that I had removed for the couch move, and that put the house back to normal in an oddly rearranged way. It wasn’t the most relaxing way to spend a Memorial Day, but the additional calm created for having the rooms rotated and ready was well worth it.

It was late in the day by the time we finished up, so I took out the hose so that #1GF! could water her garden. That is not a euphemism. I really took out the hose so she could keep her newly planted flowers from dying before they bloomed. I got a little bored, so I threw some seed into whatever holes I could. That is also not a euphemism. I was simply trying to get rid of a couple of the lawn’s wonderfully quaint potholes.

Rather than cooking, we went to dinner at a local restaurant. As I sat eating fried oysters, I thought, “Shellfish really can’t be good for you. They filter water. This is like sitting down to a plate of dirty filters on top of french fries.” I took another bite and thought, “but sea boogers are such deliciously dirty filters.”

We came home, and I sat in our new den making notes about the day. #1GF! was still unhappy that she couldn’t help move the rooms around, but I told her that it’s much more important that she spend her time building the baby than feeling guilty. She is getting bigger by the day. It seems like she’s been growing more in the last few weeks than in the first six months. It’s pretty remarkable.

Tuesday (Day 723): No Water & Lots Of Writing

I got up to get my cereal and could hear a hum coming up from the floor. It didn’t sound normal, and abnormal things in this house usually require immediate attention. I ran down to the cellar to investigate. The robot was nowhere in sight, although I could hear his wheels rattling behind one of the brick flues.

The sound was coming from the water meter, which was vibrating enough that the red needle was spinning in circles. I thought for sure that we either had a major plumbing issue, or we had bought on top of an Indian burial ground. When I shut the main water to the house off, the vibration stopped. I turned it back on, and it vibrated again. On: vibration, off: no vibration. I turned the water on one more time and ran up to open the kitchen tap. No water came out. I ran back down to shut the water off.

I stood for a second wondering what to do. It was good that I wouldn’t have to unplug the TV to keep anyone from getting sucked into it, but my mind wandered. I imagined that a pipe had exploded somewhere outside my house and could see the backhoe digging up the front yard to get at it. I looked down at the meter, and it had a number on it that said “For problems call…”, but the tag was so old and dusty that it seemed like it could only be called with a rotary telephone and a fair amount of gumption.

As fun as that sounded, I went back upstairs and called the water company. As I waded through the audio menus, I watched as a neighbor’s car left way earlier than normal, and #1GF! mentioned that another neighbor had been on her porch on the phone. It was well before 7AM, so it looked like the problem wasn’t just my house. When I finally got a person on the line, they said that a water main had broken in the next town over, and water would be restored in four to six hours. I hung up and told #1GF! the news. It was not the greatest thing to happen when everyone’s trying to get ready for work.

Without water, you can’t take a shower, use your toilet, or even brush your teeth. I realized that I need to start keeping a stash of water around for such occasions because they seem to happen quite a bit around here.

#1GF! went to her mother’s house to drive her to her appointment, and would shower there. I turned on the TV to find out where the break was, and to see the extent of the damage, but not one news channel mentioned it. After fifteen minutes, I stopped caring. It was like looking outside at the rain and searching the news to find out what the weather was going to be.

It’s uncharacteristic of me to sit and watch TV during the day, but I was annoyed at having no water once again. I had a lot of writing to do because of the Monday holiday, and I didn’t want to start and then break to shower because it would break my train of thought long before the first draft was complete. Instead, I sat there and watched an hour of TV. That’s right, I was completely unproductive. The unemployed guy sat on the couch and watched TV while you were driving to work. You can almost smell the hopelessness and Cheetos that were ground into my grey cotton sweatshirt.

Alright, maybe there was no despair or Cheetos. And maybe the sad cotton sweatpants were Adidas based and very normal. And maybe the show I was watching wasn’t something cliche like Jerry Springer, but a home improvement show. And sure it was a bit educational, but I only paid attention during the entertainment parts. And I watched the whole damned thing. For an hour. Sometimes, when I write things like this, I feel like I’ve been doing this unemployment thing all wrong.

The water was back on by 9AM, so I showered and got into writing. I wasn’t very happy with the minuscule size of my new office, but it may have been that I wasn’t used to it yet. I sat in that tiny new space and wrote LOR all day.

I took a break to hunt down some cookies, but found there weren’t any in the house. I thought about baking some, but scrapped the idea because it would be more productive to write than bake. Rewards are paid when the work is done, and I wasn’t done. In fact, I was having a harder time getting up to speed than I normally do.

I made myself some coffee in the afternoon to kick things up a notch. #1GF! came home and started working from home, but the internet started giving us trouble. Pages wouldn’t load or were aggravatingly slow, and I didn’t know if it was the new office jacks, or our ISP acting up again. I simply saved my writing in a text file until I had enough bandwidth to publish.

#1GF! wanted to take care of dinner because I was still writing, but I stepped in to help anyway. By “help out” I mean “interfere”. #1GF! was making a quiche, and she knows how to cook and can follow a recipe, but I’ve gotten so used to cooking that I couldn’t help but to interfere. Plus, she’s pregnant and I try to take care of things for her when I can. Even though I was being a pain in the ass, I have to say that sauteing spinach with garlic before putting it in improved the taste.

After dinner, I walked back into my office, and I turned sideways as if it were a tight squeeze because #1GF! was watching. She didn’t seem to feel bad for me in my tiny office. I went back to writing and finished up around 11:30PM. I published LOR 103, and started on 104. #1GF! was already in bed by the time I finished, and I was burned out tired.

Wednesday (Day 724): Endless Compression

#1GF! was drying her hair and I made her stop because I thought I heard something coming from the other room.

“Do you hear that,” I said over the sound of the dryer. The dryer wound to a stop.

“Hear what?”

At that moment, a recording of a friend of mine saying “WAAAZAAAA!” cut through the silence and scared the daylights out of poor #1GF!. The ringtone typically makes me look stupid when I’m out in public, but now it has claimed a second victim through pure fear.

My friend was on vacation, so he wanted to stop by and hang out for a while. I had planned on working on the book, but what good is not having a set 9-5 if you can’t break loose from it once and a while?

The engineer came over and we went to breakfast even though I had I already had my morning bowl of cereal. We came back to the house and sat around talking. He had to go pick up a digital antenna for his godmother at one of the big box electronics megastores, so I went along for the ride.

Other than looking at all the new types of cabling they have for video and checking the per gig price of hard drives, I wasn’t very interested in the store. I’m believe that I’m becoming electronically ambivalent.

I then went for a ride to his godmother’s house to hook the antenna up to her flat screen. The two of us tested every configuration of antenna, amplifier, and location, only to realize that the tuner in her new TV couldn’t pick up all the channels. I thought a tuner was a tuner, but all tests pointed to the tuner as the source of the problem.

I noticed that even though the guy was midway through a week’s vacation, he checked his phone every few minutes all day long. I know that I’ve been guilty of that when I worked in an office, but there were points where I’d trail off mid sentence because I knew my friend was no longer paying attention.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Yea? Sorry. I need to shut the light off on this thing or I’ll check it every time an e-mail comes in.”

“How do you decompress in a week?”

He started laughing. “You haven’t had a boss in two years. What do you need to decompress from?”

“Not me. You. You have a week off, yet you’re not really off because you’re constantly connected to work through your phone. How can you decompress?”

“I don’t know, man.”

I didn’t know either. I got dropped off at home, and the engineer went to return the antennas and start researching TVs with better quality tuners. By then, it was nearly 4PM, so I made a phone call for a job, and then made some dough for lemon cookies and threw it in the fridge to solidify.

I sat down at the computer to rough out a day of LOR, and felt like I completely blew the day. I had no check marks, and instead of suggesting something fun to do, I ran errands. It wasn’t a bad time, but I need to think of better things to do when friends have free time. Then again, it’s a Yankee tradition to define leisure time as the time you aren’t working, and that time is traditionally filled with doing chores or running errands to avoid any Puritan guilt that might be waiting for you around the next corner.

Once I roughed out a couple of days of LOR, I cooked a few batches of lemon cookies. They were ok, but didn’t taste like much of anything until I frosted them with a cup of confectioners and a lemon’s worth of juice. That addition turned them into lemon pound cake in cookie form. Once the dessert was done, I made dinner and had it ready for when #1GF! got in the door. I rarely hit that mark, but this time I did.

Thursday (Day 725): A Sleepy, Rainy Day

I took pasta salad and cookies to #1GF!’s mom and then took her to her appointment. The office was running late, so the appointment went longer than expected. I sat in the waiting room reading my book, and could feel my eyes crossing with sleep. It was only an hour, and I was trying not to fall asleep like an old man. Maybe it was that I woke up tired, or maybe it was that the weather was dreary enough to make for a good nap. In either case, I wasn’t very happy with myself for the number of yawns that were slipping by.

I went to the supermarket on the way home and picked up a few groceries, and called to set up another interview once I got home. By the time I was ready to start diving into LOR, it was already 2PM. Some days just feel blown.

I worked on the book until #1GF! got home, and we sat down to watch Fanboys. It had some bad acting and sort of a stupid plot, but it was so packed full of Star Wars references that it ended up being really entertaining. It’s certainly worth a watch for nerds, geeks, and Star Wars freaks. It also had the best portrayal of a drunk sports fan that I’ve seen on screen.

Friday (Day 726): 100 Pages Down, 200 To Go

I wrote a little LOR as a warm up, and then started working on the book. I wrote until early afternoon, and then took a break to read some feeds while I ate my lunch. That turned into some surfing, and by the time #1GF! called to check up on me, I had blown an hour. Instead of wolfing down a sandwich over the sink before getting back to writing, I realized that I was having an actual lunch hour. After I hung up, I went back to writing.

In mid afternoon, I made some coffee to counteract the effect that swinging my eyes back and forth over lines of text was having on my consciousness. I toasted the guys who I used to drink coffee with in the late afternoons at my old job, and soon after, found that I was not only toasting people who weren’t there, but I was starting to talk to myself. I left the kitchen to avoid being haunted further by the ghosts of coffees past and walked back to my small office. I sat down and wondered if spending time in a space where my feet and head could touch opposite walls was driving me a little crazy. I went back to writing anyway.

At 5PM, I was just short of 25,000 words. I took a quick break to talk to #1GF! and then cranked out one last scene to get over the hump. I had a hundred pages of text written for my first work of fiction. It was rough, but a hundred pages of even alpha version rough draft is better than no pages. A couple of hundred more pages, and it will be time to revise and refine.

I quit writing at 6:30PM as if my lunch hour had also entitled me to a quitting time. #1GF! had gone to look at some free baby stuff at her relative’s house, and my eyes were tired despite the coffee. I took a Quake break until she got home.

When #1GF! did show up, she had strollers, car seats, and all kinds of baby contraptions that were in great shape. I carried the stuff from the car to the baby’s room with a big grin on my face. I never thought I’d be so excited about baby stuff. And it was all expensive stuff with an incredibly short usability period that we wouldn’t have to spend money on. It was like Christmas in the Spring.

Saturday (Day 727): A Birthday Out West

I got up and cleaned the tub despite the protests of #1GF!. Then, I went out and mowed the lawn. Once those couple of chores were out of the way, the two of us sat around breaking up home improvement shows by asking each other what we wanted to do.

In the late afternoon, we went to a surprise 40th birthday party for an ex-coworker. I was sort of dreading the three hour round trip drive into the country, but I have to say that it was a pretty good time with a lot of good-natured nonsense and laughter.

What I Learned

• I made a stained glass cake.
• Lemon cookies without lemon icing aren’t very lemony.
• When the water goes out, the meter makes a lot of noise.
• Waking up to “something’s wrong” can be nerve jangling from someone you love.
• The damned sleeper sofa fits through the doorway no problem.
• Pregnant ladies seem to grow exponentially in their last three months.
• I’ve become some sort of control freak in the kitchen.
• There are different qualities of TV tuners?

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