Ups and Downs

The Year of Many Victories is behind schedule. I have a long way to go yet.

The Fates mock me as well. I do not seem to be out of the woods yet. I declared the first part of 2016 a season of healing, but it has not amounted to that exactly.

I almost completely sliced off one of my fingertips several weeks ago, and my finger hasn't been the same since. I was just slicing vegetables for stew, but it wasn't even like that: I cut my finger just opening a bag of baby carrots. See, normally when I am feeling hasty, I just take a steak knife to a bag and slice a corner off in one swift motion. But I was using a knife I wasn't used to, a knife from the a set of knives we got for the wedding. Kitchen-Aid, white blades. You don't take the blades seriously when they are white, but they are waaaay sharper than they need to be. Like fillet knives. Also, back in October, I snapped off two blades when carving pumpkins. For knives as flimsy as that, they should not be so sharp. So I didn't know their own strength when I treated one like any other knife, and it slid through the plastic with lightsaber ease, and dug into one of my fingers at such an angle as to almost sever the fingertip.

I was horrified, because I knew it was a bad cut. Normally, I wouldn't mind disfigurement so much, but I need sensitivity in my fingers for the piano. And it's the finger I use for tying balloons at kids' parties. Between piano and balloons, that's two thirds of my sources of income, so this injury has actually cost me hundreds of dollars.

Finally, after about two months, I can now use the finger almost normally. But it seems to be in permanent pain and feels like a combination of the nerves being prickly (that "asleep" feeling) and the feeling of being dipped in candle wax. Weird and unpleasant, and the nerves might never heal up.

We got someone to fix the foundation of the house, so that's good. Next week, more roof repairs. Actually, we are skeptical that the foundation is fixed, but it's better than it was. Hopefully we can move forward and finally install the new floor tiles.

This past week, exhausted from trying to move forward with different areas of achievements I want to make, my soul needed comfort food. And a little bit of laziness. I figured, Wednesday is the day I usually have the house to myself, so it would be the perfect day to mow the lawn unhindered, and I also figured why not evoke the summers of my youth, mowing the lawn and playing Super Nintendo afterwards? The riding mower had three flat tires and wouldn't start, and I couldn't even find the key to see if a new batter would do the trick. So the riding mower was out, which sucks because I planned on using the cupholder to hold Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, which just hit the shelves, and is the perfect lawnmowing reward. Well, whatever: I'll just use the push mower and start a new game on Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was known on SNES). It was going to be fun, and remind me of summers of my youth.

Tuesday night, I managed to watch Air Force One and about half of The Rock before I realized it was 2:00 in the morning and the baby was probably going to wake me up in five hours. Yes, I was going to a lot of effort to cultivate a mindset of 90s nostalgia, filtering and ignoring distractions that would lead me astray.

Wednesday afternoon came around, and Juliet took the baby with her to go do her thing. We have an acre, and about half of that was still overgrown from when we bought the house almost a year ago, so I had a lot of work to do. I didn't expect to get it all done, by any means. I did expect, however, to mow for about three hours, in a pleasant mood, and then have shandy and SNES afterwards. You know what else? I opened YouTube and started running a couple of "SNES longplay" videos, one on my Kindle and one on the laptop, for background noise whenever I would come inside for a drink of Gatorade. Wait, Gatorade and Leinenkugel's? I promise you, this is not product placement. I am telling a story.

So, yeah. A couple of 90s action flicks fresh in my memory, a couple of ghosts in my house "playing" SNES in the background via YouTube walkthroughs (for the record, they were Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past and Super Metroid), and the promise of starting Final Fantasy IV for old times' sake, the second half of The Rock, and plenty of shandy. All in the name of having a good mood while I mow.

Only an hour and a half of mowing, not even running out of gas for the first time yet, and the lawnmower burst into flame. I instantly ran for the hose, but I didn't even make it across the yard before the fire spread so much that I knew I couldn't put it out. By the time I was on the line with 911, the northbound wind had spread it across almost the entire breadth of the front yard, from the south fence to the gravel driveway on the north end.

In parched Texas, fires are serious. That was a hell of a close call with the house. Now, we have a scorched wasteland, and we're down by one lawnmower, but at least the yard won't need to be mowed for a while.

The fire melted a component in the water pipe, since the meter access is in the front yard. So as of Wednesday afternoon, we have no water at the house. For what I believe is the... fourth time in a year?

When the fire department left, I decided, "I'm clocking out. No more problems today." I started on the shandy early, and finished watching The Rock, which, as I said, I started the night before. The SNES consoles, of which I have three, are all finicky and screwed me out of playing. So, after the movie was over, I listened to its entire soundtrack, including the extended score bootlegs, and there was still a void in my life. And Juliet was staying out later than expected. So I kept drinking shandy and actually watched The Rock a second time. Yeah. I did that. This is like confessing I ate an entire box of cookies all by myself. Don't judge me.

My Kindle Fire somehow got its power button jammed. So the only way to wake it from sleep mode is to plug it in and unplug it again, effectively rendering it a desktop computer in terms of convenience. I wonder if I can fix that button jam?

But my sister hooked me up with a new smartphone. I finally have a smartphone. I deeply resent the condescension from everyone else who had better fortunes than I, who have had smartphones for years now. Like I am just now joining the 21st fucking century. Quite frankly, other than GPS to find last-minute changes of venues on my way to a gig, I don't need one. And neither do you, if you want to get right down to it. Fuck your Pandora settings, and fuck your Instagram meal pictures with their vintage filters. My Kindle Fire was limited, but adequate. And the screen was luxuriously large compared to a phone.

But the Kindle relies on local wifi, which is another limitation. Now, with a smartphone, I can use Twitter with reckless abandon, the way everyone else does. Of course, I am using it almost entirely to abuse Donald Trump.

I have a very crappy weekend ahead of me. But things could be a lot worse. It's almost getting hard to tell anymore whether or not I'm having a "good day," because the average day the past year for me has been so horrible, I have a skewed barometer for what is auspicious. I think I need to watch another 90s action flick.