Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I need a desk fan for the room I work in. V is kind enough to use their skills in online shopping for me, and ordered one the other day to arrive today.

So this afternoon they said "Oh, Erik, I think your fan is on the way," and I presume they got a text about it or whatever.

But a visiting friend heard this, no context, and said she thought they meant, like, an admirer of mine.

It'd be so funny if someone came around just because they liked me.

Meanwhile, I'm so unbelievably tempted to write "A fan of Erik" on the fan. It's in a room full of sharpies. I could so easily do this.

Busy day today.

Actually worked hard all day at work, which hasn't so far happened this week. My 10,000-or-so word report is now full of edits from the proofreader. I hadn't had this happen before but I'd been warned about it, from how many there would be to the fact that they might re-write policy recommendations (which is the whole point of us writing these reports). Which is good because both of those happened to me. It meant I was better able to spend my shock and outrage on him materially changing the content of quotes and of also making some truly bizarre and incorrect changes. He has changed all of my em dashes to hyphens! Of all the things!

Right after work I started trying to put together the new raised bed for our garden. I've done like two of these every spring for, this will be the third year now. There's only one this year but it's a chonky boy, as big as the two smaller ones put together. But of the same style: corrugated metal in curved parts that form a semi-circle for each end, and then straight parts for a long section in the middle. It all just has to be bolted together.

I did half and then "ran out of" screws/bolts (I actually found one bag but missed the other in the packaging). Which was an okay stopping place anyway as it was time to cook dinner. With no one else around I took it upon myself to make (veggie) bangers and (sweet potato) mash, with broccoli.

As we were finishing that up, V who had been very patient about all the rubble and dust that had fallen down into the fireplace while builders were busy capping off the chimney yesterday started work on the cleanup I'd promised to help with. Their OCD is bad at the moment because they're having a flare, and this had been there since yesterday, and they were really struggling with it not having been cleaned yet especially as it's time for our regular fortnightly visit from our cleaners tomorrow. We'd taped cardboard over the opening of the fireplace but heard dirt and rocks fall down it all the while the work was going on yesterday, so were wary of what we'd find when the cardboard was removed.

But I got the little cheapie Shopvac out of the shed and used it for the first time, which was an experience. It's so loud! And our masks continue to come in handy. It wasn't eaay cleaning up soot-covered rocks and dirt from a black hearth but I did my best, with damp cloths for the bits too small for the vac to pick up at the end. V was pleased with the results, and did a good job of leaving the bits they noticed as soon as we'd put the room back together -- because of course spots you missed are immediately going to stand out -- for the cleaners. It's at a level now that can be dealt with by normal cleaning tools, which was my measure of success. I emptied the vac and took the filter off to clean in the sink, making some progress but of course covering my hands and arms and torso in soot and filth in the process. I love cleaning really dirty things though. And my Bruce Springsteen tour knockoff t-shirt, with the sleeves newly cut off, seemed like a great one to anoint with the grime of Honest Work.

Just before I'd started in on this, tough, a local friend had messaged D and I to ask if we wanted to go for a drink on this beautiful evening (high of 81°F today! I also got the big pillar fan out of the shed when I got the shopvac out). Having just resigned myself to immersion in dirt and sweat (at one point I had to stop holding the filter under the faucet because I had so much sweat in my eyes it was stinging me enough to make it impossible to go on without cleansing my hands enough to wipe my face!), looking forward to a shower and an early bed, I was suddenly incredibly motivated to get through this so I could go meet our friend. My extrovert batteries that didn't get the recharge they expected last night perked right up at this, ha.

So after I did what I could and tried to keep V from doing too much more than they could, I ran upstairs, changed into a clean t-shirt (a Minnesota Gophers one thus time; wow I really am hashtag dad vibes these days), convinced D to come out with me despite his sleepiness, and I had a great time.

I got home, finally did have that shower, and now I'm in bed.

Today has been non-stop, but so nice. And I can't remember how long it's been since both those things were true at the same time.

Gary has a little corner of the living room now.

In our living room, on top of the storage cupboard, is a framed professional photo of the three of us, me holding Gary, all of us looking at him and smiling, sitting on top of a pink box-folder size box with a scalloped edge on the lid. The box is fuzzy because he loved that texture, he'd have liked to rub his face on this box. Inside are his ashes in a pewter heart with pawprints on it, his favorite blanket, and his leash/harness.

Next to the box is a digital painting of a photo of Gary wearing a bow tie, the one time we got something approximating "clothes" on him, and for just the length of time it took to get the photo. We say it's his "school picture day" picture because that's what he looks like!

Hanging from that frame is a jack russell-shaped Christmas ornament with Gary's name on it, which was taken off the gay tree on my desk where I'd given it pride of place when I decorated it, a few long weeks ago.

There's a small packet of poppy seeds that we were given by the vet hospital, which hag will plant in our garden when it's time to.

And there's a little thing I got D for Christmas which says "home is where the dog is" that was made by a local artist and which I added one of the Gary stickers to (that V made a few months ago from an amazing digital painting of him that they did).

At least two friends have offered to depict Gary, in a painting and ceramic, once we can get them reference photos which is so overwhelmingly sweet of them to offer. So eventually we'll have those things there too.

Now that I've used up all my NHS counseling and am for the first time able to pay for it privately, I can frame this to myself in the funniest ways. Like "After work today I paid a lady £X to tell her how good Gary is." I did, but it was actually so helpful and I'm glad I could do that.

I loaded the dishwasher last night!

It made me smile when I opened it this morning and I recognized where almost everything had been left.

Loading the dishwasher is the one chore that I exempt myself from since I moved to this house. The dishwasher relatively small, difficult to fit stuff in, easy to have dishes stay dirty, and my lack of depth perception makes it extra stressful to try to deal with all this. Plus it works for our household to run it last thing at night and unload it in the morning, and literally my worst at doing any thing after dinnertime. I'm much more suited to unloading it in the mornings, which I started doing when I only lived here on the weekends because I was almost always the first person up and about and I wanted to contribute to the household that had done so much for me.

Anyway, last night both of the others were upstairs resting by 7:30pm and neither looked overly capable of doing any more chores, so after I closed the windows and curtains and took the dog out for his last pee of the evening and checked if the bin needed to go out, I thought I'd give it a try.

But like I said, I unload the dishwasher most mornings so it's not like I have no idea what goes where!

V did end up coming back downstairs and noticed I'd done their usual chore (usually D and/or I make dinner and V cleans up the kitchen afterward). They even checked the state I'd left the dishwasher in and reassured me that it was fine, aww.

I wouldn't like to do this every day, but I'm glad I could do it!

Mowed the lawn. Overdue - as it always seems to be this summer, I just can't get on top of it when it rains so much. And I'm so tired/burnt out all the time. So it feels good to have done something.

I guess I also did a Tesco order for tomorrow -- we needed more milk for Gary (yes he's got his own milk, there are five kinds of milk in this house for the three humans and one dog in it) and peanut butter and a few other things, but it hadn't been that long since our last grocery order so I also flung some fun stuff in the virtual basket too, like ice cream now that I can believe that summer weather might come back.

I read a third of How Infrastructure Works, a book I originally put on my library hold list intending to see if it'd make a good present for D, my beloved infrastructure nerd. When I told him I'd done this, probably six months ago, he said he'd considered buying it for me as well. Aww. It does seem to be a good book!

And I did a lot of Gary management (this is the reason I stayed home and am not camping this weekend). He's had a sad day. He woke us both up at like three in the morning, and that takes some doing once MB has taken off her hearing aid! I was already with him and had turned the light on and had done the things that usually snap him out of his barking fits -- sometimes he's explicitly asking for help, the rest of the time whatever he's angry/scared about he can be distracted from by the presence of his humans.

I felt very helpless and disoriented when me going to him and talking to him and all the usual stuff didn't work. I'm kinda the nuclear option when it comes to the dog; if I can't soothe him/pick him up/etc, it's likely that no one can. So on these rare occasions where I can't do anything for him, it feels not just heartbreaking but a little eerie, like having a familiar path suddenly disappear and leave me stranded in lonely darkness. And this feeling is not made worse by the blood-sugar-crash hours of the night...

I very glad I didn't leave MB to deal with Gary this weekend on her own. He's behaved but he's still a lot of work right now, through no fault of his own.

An empty plastic watering can just fell off the top of the fridge, when no one was in that room, hadn't been for a while, and we hadn't been near the fridge anyway.

I like to make a note of these things in case I ever get a poltergeist.

The last time a mysterious object suddenly appeared - a wristband from an event I hadn't gone to was neatly resting on top of my bedside table - I think it must've just been found under something by the cleaners who I'd forgotten had been here earlier that day.

(I still didn't recognize the discarded wristband, which felt a little weird but not actually inexplicable, considering that my bedroom had had four other relative-strangers living in it at different times since D and MB have had this house...and I do try to keep the room reasonably tidy, I wouldn't be surprised if something like a wristband could remain undetected. Once I lost my headphones for a long time and never did find out where they'd been, they're just something else I discovered on the bedside table when our cleaner had done his excellent work.)

The more I think about it, the more I think a poltergeist would actually have a really terrible time making themselves known in a house that contains a blind person, a dyspraxic hard-of-hearing person, someone with untreated ADHD, and a blind cognitively-impaired dog. Like, anything weird that happens in the house, anything that's in a place it shouldn't be or isn't where it should be, I think we're just going to assume that's because of us and all our shit rather than anything supernatural.

Holy shit I actually got to see an aurora last night!

diffrentcolours drove us (and friends!) out to the middle of nowhere and I got out of the car thinking I wonder what I'll see....if anything and it was actually amazing. I am surprised I didn't cry.

What we saw didn't look like most of the photos I've seen: I was expecting green or purple sheets coming up from the horizon and what we saw was a band stretching l across the sky, with twisty dancing shapes almost straight up over our heads, like the jewel in a ring.

The shapes changed more quickly than I expected! What first looked like a pinch in a fabric seam was soon the Firebird logo, then something I first called a comet but quickly decided was a jellyfish... It was like looking at clouds and finding patterns in them, only better and more eerie.

One of the first shapes I saw was a bat. So that was good.

I have only these words, no photos: my phone camera just showed a black square when I pointed it at the sky. I know a lot of people had better results with their phone cameras than their eyes but this was maybe the first time my camera couldn't see a lot better than I can!

I was in bed at 1.59am, which isn't quite unprecedented for me but it is about five hours later than I've been going to bed lately. As a chronic insomniac specializing in sleep-maintenance insomnia, I'm used to waking up soon after that! I wouldn't care but I've signed up for my gym class tomorrow morning. But I thought that if in the morning I had to sleepily text the trainer and explain that I couldn't make it because I was up half the night looking at aurora, they'd probably be nice about it.

I didn't have to do that though. Despite waking up about eight minutes before I would ideally be ready to go, and D being mostly-asleep still, we did make it.

We got home, I had a shower, had lunch, then I wanted to mow the lawn because again it desperately needed it and it hasn't even been raining the last few days. It's properly warm today though; I caught the sun a little and I was so sweaty afterward that I'd already undone all the good work that the shower had accomplished.

But I had nice iced tea that I'd finally remembered to make yesterday. Green tea with spearmint, it's so tasty and refreshing.

It ended up being a busy day. The other two went to B&M while I dozed on the sofa, and then D and I went for a bike ride just in time to miss the official Cycle Fest, but there was still loud music and nice weather and food and drinks and lots of people, lots of little kids and dogs to smile at.

It's a short bike ride but on top of gym and lawn mowing which were both hard on my ankle, it was all the biking I'd be happy about doing anyway. I'm delighted at how much I've been able to do today though.

No Eurovision in this household tonight, which feels weird but I feel sick at the thought of pretending everything's okay in Gaza when it's not. So instead I finished a library book this evening (The Divorce Colony) and I think it's been months since I could say that!

Another good weekend day, again 100% thanks to good weather.

I hung a couple of loads of laundry on the line. We'll have to move the clothesline because there are increasingly many big pots and raised beds under its path, which is okay for now but I know when the strawberry plants and a few others get going as we get into summer, there won't be any room to hang laundry there!

I finally got to mow the lawn! First time this spring, so I also learned where the WD40 has to go to make the lawnmower move because it was stuck solid; the wheels/blades wouldn't move at all.

And I tidied the shed a bit, looking for the WD40. (It wasn't there, but the shed is tidier!)

All the grass clippings got to go in the compost bin, which is much-depleted after contributing to the new raised beds I built a few weeks ago and the other planting MB has been doing lately.

When I was done with the lawn (or as done as I was going to get today), I sat outside eating my lunch in my gym shorts and baseball cap and tank top, feeling like a dad.

Even more so when we went to two garden centers this afternoon, buying a big pot and topsoil at the one that has those and peat-free compost and strulch (straw mulch) at the one who has those. And I might have tempted MB to another acer. And picked the pot for that one. I love it when the three of us get to go on little outings like this.

At home we put the acer in its big pot, threw strulch (which keeps away weeds and holds in moisture) around where it was needed, and tidied up the garden a little.

Gary has had a good day too. He loves the warm weather so he's had a million little walks and been outside a lot. He was happy that we could keep the back door open most of the day and he's just been such a good boy. I'm so happy to see him happy.

We started today with three beds and one sofa in this house.

At lunchtime we had three beds and two sofas. (The living room was very crowded with both sofas, and all our other usual stuff!)

By the end of the day we had two beds and one sofa.

I woke up at one goddam thirty this morning and never got back to sleep, a miserable state of affairs, so I'm very glad I had the chance to nap for an hour between work and the most intense bit of furniture wrangling (our bed and sofa, along with a lot of other stuff, were being moved to the new home of a friend getting out of a bad situation).

I am exhausted, from the lack of sleep and the exertion, happily full of takeaway and beer, and in bed by 9:30.

( I am having an unsettling day. )