errantember

Jesus. I've been helping my Mom recover from foot surgery recently, and it's been tough on both of us. I've been 200 miles away from home for almost 30 of the past 45 days, and today we found out she may not be walking again for another six weeks. I have Huge Plans to drive to Portland this summer that have already been hugely delayed, but she lives alone, and can barely get around with a wheelchair and walkers without help. She also can't reach all of her own feet, which makes keeping track of her Activac mechanical wound vampire thing difficult. She teaches adult education, and has lots of devoted students, friends and neighbors helping her, but naturally they can't do as good a job as a devoted family member. My Mom really busted her ass taking care of me as a child, with a bipolar and often out-of-work father. Her incredible devotion, focus, and hard work is the main reason I'm where I am today, and I know I can never full repay that debt. It feels like the least I can do is take a few weeks out of my life to help her through what should be a temporary hardship. Paying someone else to do it amounts to thousands of dollars per *week*.

Balanced against staying and helping is the fact that the trip to Portland is not some kind of recreational vacation. It's something I've been working on for months, if not years, and is the first major step to manifesting my new life of mobile development and living light in people's back yards. Mom's house is also filled with cigarette smoke and Fox News 24/7, and it's nearly impossible for me to get any work done on my career while I'm here. I have a huge amount of momentum making the move from corporate cog to independent developer, and a lot of will be lost if I stay here too long. More to the point, distractions and depression are the two biggest obstacles to me being able to pay the bills as an App developer, and both of those are going to be hard-core monkeys on my back as long as I'm here. Of course, the guilt of leaving will be with me if I choose to do that. I've also put thousands of dollars in parts and hundreds of hours of labor into getting my car ready for the trip. Finally, I have existing and potential romantic relationships in Portland, and this is the last funded trip I have before cutting myself off pending money from my new career. I chose to remove money from my retirement account for the second time just yesterday to keep myself afloat, and, even with everything as uncertain as it is, I still steadfastly refuse to seek full-time corporate work. I know if stay focused on my App development, I can get to a point where I'm paying my bill in six months or less, but if I let *anything* distract me, I won't make it.

Finally, my Mom has some issues with feeling loved and appreciated due to her tough life, and combined with the guilt issues I've had for years over our relationship, there's a very real threat that she will continue to see her own need as trumping what's going on in my life if I don't assert some boundaries. I'm fairly certain there's an internal monologue in her head that says "my son isn't really amounting to anything, he's committing financial suicide, and compared to what he has going on taking care of me is *much* more important." As much as I want to help her, I have my own life with a huge number of moving parts, and I can't simply turn it off, no matter how important the motivation. If it were a longer-term situation of her needing help, I'd have to put my foot down and say "if you really need long-term help from me, you're going to have to move to my town," but the fact that this is of medium-but-undetermined-term makes the water much muddier.

I've also had the luxury of living a pretty soft, self-centered life, and this is forcing me to grown up in a lot of ways that are painful but probably good in the long term. I really love my Mom, and being forced into a pressure cooker with her has actually allowed me to re-connect with some kinds of love for her that got blocked in my childhood. Those issues have caused intimacy problems with my partners, and I can already see the breaking of some emotional dams overflowing into those relationships.

The good news is that she has long term care insurance that kicks in in mid-July, and assuming she qualifies, she should be able to get more comprehensive home care.

From a taking action perspective, I think the best way forward may be to go home for as long as I need to to get the place ready for a five week absence, then return to D/FW on my way to Portland, with no intention of returning home before I head out. This will allow me to get what I need to get done done, but provide her with as much support as I can before I'm unavailable for a month. It will actually be a better test of living in yurt, which I will set up in her back yard, than doing it at home, since I won't have access to all my own shit there. I still have an overheating problem with the car I'll be taking on this 4400+ mile sojourn, and driving back up to D/FW will be a good test of the new radiator I have on order before trekking out cross country.

I've been re-engineering my social media presence, so I haven't been updating here as much. This will remain my private, post-whatever-the-hell-you-want blog.

Big Things are happening in my life. After lots of work and expense to peachify it, I sold my Honda to the very first person who came to look at it. I got a really good price, and I think he also got a deal, as it's very hard to find a vehicle that old in such excellent condition. I've been operating under the budgetary assumption that I could get a certain amount for the vehicle, and due to conservative estimates and good planning, I managed to get quite a bit more than necessary to satisfy my budget. That extra money is getting gobbled up very quickly, though, for several reasons.

First, my fabulous Sealy mattress of ten years is now officially less comfortable to sleep on than my concrete floor. I ordered a new memory foam mattress, which won't be here for at least a week. I've been sleeping on my jujutsu mats, which are stiffer thank Rick Sanctorum at an Erasure concert.

I feel more martial already.

Luckily a friend came through with a spare full-sized mattress, which is being delivered tomorrow evening, so I should be in better shape then.

The timing is also excellent, as I'm moving from my 500+ sq. ft. master suite into one 144 sq. ft. bedroom. The married couple I live with will be moving in the other direction, which can only lead, one assumes, to increased marital (and therefore household) harmony.

At least, that's the theory.

Another theory at work is that it would be useful for me to try simulating living in an RV for longer periods of time, since it's my intention to get one, then spend months at a time on the road. I love Austin, and don't want to be based elsewhere, but I'm Done with Austin summers. I have friends and lovers in Portland and Atlanta, and lots of other places I'd like to visit. I'm also engineering my career in a more mobile direction. Anywhere I have wi-fi, I'll be able to earn income.

So in addition the new, smaller full-sized mattress (coming down from a queen), I'm also getting a loft bed for the new digs. I'm not exactly sure how sex is going to go with that little ceiling clearance, but I'll have the spring mattress arriving tomorrow for "guests."

It's like college all over again.

One major motivation in getting extra money for the truck was to be able to visit the beautiful spottedvasa again, and I just finished getting my tickets for that.

Finally, I recently decided to dovetail my desires to sell a lot of shit (144 < 500) with my desire to save money, so I zeroed out my food budget. If I want to eat in the next six months, I can't take it out of savings. I have to get it from additional sales of Crap I make. I took a few weeks worth out of the car money to jump start that effort, and I also have my first salvo of items on Ebay. By the time those auctions are done, I should have enough to survive for a month an a half in my piggy bank.

My current budget includes the large chunk of money my Honda will magically turn into when I sell it. Right before I finally got serious about it, the shocks went bad, and it was wobbling all over the place whenever I hit a bump. I got some new shocks, found my Chilton's manual, and have now replaced one of four shocks.

It only took six hours.

I'm also bleeding in several places because I was too stupid to don protective handwear for the adventure, and missed jujutsu because leaving the spring in it's compressed state in the iffy compressors I borrowed from Advance Auto didn't seem very safe. My dojo-mates would probably also prefer not to touch me when I'm bleeding. Most people don't, which, if nothing else, proves I'm not female.

I've learned many useful lessons installing the first strut, things like Wear Fucking Gloves and Don't Put the Spring Compressors on Upside Down, etc. Hopefully the other three will go faster tomorrow.

Then I have to find the torque wrench...

(knocks on wood)

The Metro and the scooter have both been running perfectly for 3+ days 40+ miles. I worked on the Metro today anyway, to further insulate it against future issues, but not because it Wouldn't Go.

Gonna take the Metro to Flipside. Then to College Station. Then to fucking Dallas!

You WATCH me.

I'm currently super annoyed at my Geo Metro. Two days ago I went outside to look into the occasional knocking and stalling it's been having recently to find the vehicle won't start at all. I have the factor shop manual, and have been working through the steps. I'm well past the point at which things should Just Work because I've made more than a token effort to fix things and have Spent Money. One thing that would really help is having an ODB II scanner. I have a code reader, but I need to see real-time data on things like engine air intake temperature, and all mine does is pull codes. Maintenance minutia follows:
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Undoubtedly tired after it's long nap, the Metro has been running quite rough since I got it running again.
Dealing with frequent re-starts and sluggish off-the-deck performance was bad enough, but I should have known I was really in trouble when I couldn't get the fucker started after four tries while an ambulance was crawling up my ass, lights flashing and horn blazing. Maintenance minutia follows:
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I did all *kinds* of shit today.

Fixed the thermostat on the Metro, greatly improving long driving trips

Got a buckwheat pillow, a really nice electric meat/veggie slicer, and a French press at Thrift Land for under $17

Repaired and mortared the second set of tiles in the bathroom. I should be able to grout tomorrow.

Got some sweetened condensed milk to make Tai Ice Tea

Made Scones from The New Best Recipe for the second time

Killed countless mosquitoes with a merciless device that boils their bodies in mid-flight

Beat Samurai Showdown II Twice, once with Jubei and once with Kyoshiro, while waiting for other shit to happen.

Details below:
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I've been desperately trying to get rid of my Mom's 1995 Mazda 626 for going on five years now. Most of the delay was this surreal paper chase through the state bureaucracy that would have made the application paperwork for Emperor in ancient China look simple by comparison. However, I *finally* have the car in *my* name, with current registration. Last we left our abandoned white-trashmobile, the transmission had a clearly fatal problem, but other than a dead battery, the car was drivable. A transmission repair has been more than the car is worth for the entire time, so I wasn't expected to get much for it, but after sinking about $200 into all the title bullshit plus a new battery, now the engine won't start because there's no fuel. I got tired of fighting airwings of mosquitoes tonight, and decided to wait until tomorrow to see if I can find the wires for the fuel pump. I found another valve wire that had been eaten through by rats, so I'm hoping that maybe it's just a bad wire and won't require replacing the fuel pump, because at that point I'm giving up and having it towed away.

At any rate, it will be gone soon, and hopefully I can at least get a few hundred for it.

I made two repairs to the Metro recently, after having made the final payment for it (a total of $700 for a fairly well-known vehicle) and sent off the title paperwork for the third time.

First, I noticed that sometimes it was hard to get the car into gear, which worried me since trippedbreaker and I spent months replacing the clutch. However, I realized that the disengage for the clutch was in the *middle* of the pedal's throw rather than at the end, where it belonged. Two rotations of the tensioning nut at the end of the clutch cable, though, and now it works perfectly.
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So I recently had one of those "oh-thank-God-no-one-was-hurt-*AND*-they*didn't*ask*for*insurance-I'm-*so*-lucky - my-tags-were-out-and-Dad-was-in-the-car-it's-going-to-take-*HOW*-much to fix?!?!?"-kind of fender benders while scoping chicks or some other more-important-than-not-killing-people-while-driving activity, to the tune of about $2500.00. And this estimate was from a Christian missionary that's a personal friend of my father's, which is the next best thing to Mom honesty-wise. It was one of those "each piece is only bent two degrees, but you have to replace them all and there are twelve"-kind of estimates. There were three resulting problems, two of which I was able to fix today via a process that began with wrapping a chain around a nearby tree...
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