“I'm OK. Ups and downs” (a look at month 3)

My standard response when anyone asks me how I am is, “I'm OK. Ups and downs.” And it's always the truth. I'm not wallowing in the pit of despair; I'm not having celebratory parties. I'm OK. And this month, every time I had an up or a down, I wrote it down on a notepad, and I realized that would be the perfect content for this blog post! So without further ado, my list of the ups and downs I've experienced in the third month after the love of my life passed away.

Ups:

• I'm a huge sunroof fan. I just like to have that extra light in the car when I'm driving around. But when there are two people in the car, you can almost never use the sunroof because the sun almost always hits one person, so I never really got to use it when Vic was in the car, which was most of the time. I also like opening the sunroof when I'm driving around in the evenings. I love the rush of fresh air. He did not, because in his later years, he was always cold. But now, I use the sunroof all the time.
• Crochet date night. Last month, one of my crochet buddies read my blog post lamenting the loss of date night and asked if I wanted to have a crochet date night. (She was also the foster coordinator at the Longmont Humane Society who was responsible for getting us to foster Bella, so she's really the gift that keeps on giving.) Naturally, I said yes, and the next thing I know, she's inviting another one of our crochet buddies, and I'm inviting my crochet buddy, and now crochet date night is a thing. It gives me something to shift my focus when I realize it's Friday night and I'm not with my date.
• I changed my password at work last week. I had a password change come due shortly after Vic passed away, and I decided I was going to do a year of Vic-related passwords. This is my second one, and it incorporates his profile name on one of our streaming sites: Thag. This is an up because it always makes me laugh when I type that part of my password, which I do at least a dozen times every day.
• Another thing I did last week was have an early breakfast with a dear friend from my early days at Leopard, when I idolized her (as I still do). This alone is an up, but there's more.
• As I pulled out of the garage and drove down the street, I noticed that many of the cars had frost on them. We lived in a townhouse for 14 years that didn't have a garage, and for at least seven of those years, I drove to work. Did I ever have to scrape the frost of my car? I did not. Vic always scraped my car off for me. One of the things I am fond of saying at bridal showers is, “A wedding is a day. A marriage is every day.” I have said this countless times over the years, but Vic always showed up for me.
• As I drove down to Lafayette, the sun was rising. And it's fall, so the leaves are changing. And the Earth is in just the right place that the sunrise is particularly spectacular. These are all things that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't married Vic.
• I just realized last week that I don't have to wear headphones when I'm on a work call. #FreedomFromTheCord
  
• Showers are boring, and although I have a boatload of music and a bazillion portable devices, you can't just put an one in the bathroom. You can't even hear one of the original iPods without a sound dock (yes, I still have an original iPod—do you want to make something of it?), and the volume doesn't go high enough on a newer iPod or an iPhone to hear it over the running of the water. I do have a sound dock, but I use it at my desk to keep my (very old) iPod charged (it no longer holds a charge at all, but as long as it's hooked up to the sound dock, it always has power). Vic had two sound docks—but they were his, and he used them where they were. I certainly didn't want to be moving any of our sound docks back and forth to the bathroom every day. Not to mention that Vic was usually asleep when I was taking my shower, and I didn't want to wake him with blaring music that he probably wouldn't have even liked. Vic offered to buy me a waterproof Bluetooth speaker for my birthday one year, but then I would have had to to take my phone in to the bathroom, and the Bluetooth drains the battery, and that's not the device where I keep all my music, and none of my other devices had Bluetooth, blah blah blah. But last week I was in the shower and it occurred to me that ... uh ... Vic was no longer using his sound docks. So on Monday, I pulled one of his sound docks into the bathroom, hooked up his (very old) iPod Touch and started playing an album, which was the Statler Brothers, whom I love. It may have been my best home shower ever. Now I just have to make a shower playlist in iTunes.
• The World Series started yesterday, and I don't have to watch it. Vic loved baseball, and although he didn't follow it religiously (he only cared about how the Rockies were doing), he did tend to tune in to the end-of-season games. I don't love baseball, and my shows piled up on the DVR during the playoffs and the series. (That said, I did get a lot of crafting done during those games. When I'm watching a movie or a show, I often have to look up to see what is going on, and if it's really good, I stop stitching/crocheting for a few minutes. If I cry—and let's face it, this is why I watch the shows I watch: for a good cry—I have to stop for even longer. But during a baseball game, I never have to look up once! So this could just as easily gone in the "Downs" list.)

Downs:

• I received a branded apron from my company recently. I had participated in a months-long event called 100% You, which gave us access to four amazing woman who coached us on money, movement, meals and mindfulness, and the apron was a gift from the “meals” segment. I wanted to take a picture of myself in the apron, and a selfie just wasn't going to cut it. Obviously, Vic was always my go-to guy for taking pictures of me, whether I was showing off a crochet project I just finished, modeling something someone else gave me, or just wanting to put something special on Facebook. The realization that he would never again take a picture of me was a real blow.
• Side note: There was a time when I got tired of Vic taking pictures of me—specifically on vacations—and we could both point to the exact picture when it happened. He did not like that at all—he took it as criticism—and he didn't take a picture of me for two years after that. We laughed about it in our later years, but there was always a tinge of anger in his laugh.🤣
• Similarly, I miss the person I could really celebrate my wins with. The person who didn't think I was bragging about how many blue ribbons I won at the fair (not gonna lie—it was a lot 🤣), or something good happened at work, or someone on the street complimented a hat I made.
• Recently, the TV show Eli Roth's History of Horror showed up on the DVR. We watched the first two seasons when they came out—Vic was a huge fan of old horror movies 🧛‍♀️ (and some new ones), and that is something I shared with my dad (we called them Patty Daddy movies)—and the third season started recently. I'll watch it in his memory, but I'll be sad.
• I have had some lower back pain for a long while, and I have tried a number of treatments. Now I'm going to get a treatment that requires anesthesia, and you know what that means: I need a ride. I am fortunate that my sister is retired, so she is able to take me to this appointment, but she lives in Littleton. This is going to be an all-day thing for her, instead of the two-hour thing it would have been for Vic.
• The watermelons in the garden mocked my grief. They kept growing even though the person who really wanted them was no longer here. A-holes.
• Halloween. It was not his favorite holiday (that was Thanksgiving), but our neighborhood is particularly festive come Halloween. Last year was subdued. I don't know if you are aware, but there was a pandemic. But one day, on my Bella walk, I noticed that the one house that would be Clark Griswold's main competition in a Halloween Vacation movie was starting to set up again. He loved that house.
• Just realizing how many things Vic did—even in the later years when he was really going downhill—that I took for granted. I often thanked him for doing things that were his “job” (just because it's his chore doesn't mean I can't be grateful), but I don't think I had any idea how many things he actually did around the house until I had to start doing them myself. I hope he didn't feel like I took him for granted.
  
• Side note: I find it exceedingly ironic that both “uphill” and “downhill” have a negative connotation. This was something I discovered when I was trying to equate “ups and downs” with a roller coaster ride.
  
• Facebook served me up with the following memory—an old post of mine—a week ago: “You gotta love a guy who goes to the store at 8 o'clock at night—alone and unrequested—to get you exactly the cough syrup you want. I'm not saying that Vic did that, because he doesn't like it when I brag about him on Facebook, I'm just saying that I could be married to a guy like that for, oh, 26 years, 2 months and 5 days. Maybe longer.” Yes indeed. I could be married to a guy like that for 32 years, 11 months and 14 days.
• Similar to that TV program showing up on the DVR, I got milk from Safeway the other day, and although we're not even past Halloween yet, it's Christmas at Safeway: eggnog in the house! Eggnog. One of Vic's favorite drinks, and Safeway eggnog was his favorite. He was a huge eggnog fan because (a) he liked the way it tasted, (b) it packed a lot of calories and (c) it shut me up when I was complaining that he wasn't eating enough. We kept Safeway eggnog in business for a decade. The saddest thing about seeing the eggnog was remembering that last year, he wasn't as fond of it, and it was just a reminder that although he died in July, the process started much earlier than that.
• And similar to that, I got an email from McDonald's last week. The McRib is back. Vic. Loved. The McRib.
  

The interesting thing is, when I have an “up” moment, it is usually followed by sadness, and when I have a “down” moment, it is usually followed by a smile. In a weird way, the up moments seem to reinforce the fact that he's gone, but down moments remind me how lucky I was to have Vic as my husband, my best friend, my true partner in life. Grief is funny that way.

Last week was the worst. No ups, all downs. Two incidents that caused me to break down in sobs, and one that I would have had my friend Linda not been here with me—with her here, I was able to laugh off my pain. I had no focus last week. No energy. And this was with the mindfulness exercises I was doing and crochet date night! But I'm just chalking it up to the fact that the three-month mark was approaching, and I'm expecting the sadness to ebb when today passes, just as it did after the two-month mark.

As usual, I'll leave you with some pictures. These highlight the ups and downs of this month.

Fall trees in the neighborhood

The first picture of me not taken by Vic

The moment when I said, “Can you please stop taking pictures of me?”
And then he did. For two years.

 

 

 

Watermelon salad made with
one of Vic's watermelons

And, yes, I'm going to post 13 pictures of Vic's favorite Halloween house. Enjoy!

This is the left side of the house—or in pirate parlance, the port side.

This is the full front yard—and it changes every year.

I made this one extra large so you could see their wicked sense of humor—
that is supposed to be a trick-or-treater in there.

This is what you see as you head up to the door.

And this is how beautiful it looks at night.

If you made it this far, as always, I thank you all for your support. It really helps to have a village. ❤️

Lucy and Ethel ship a steamer trunk to Florida

Vic's beloved Grandma Jones had a steamer trunk. Can you imagine the days when steamer trunks were your luggage? (Can you imagine traveling by steam ship??) This thing is 4 ft. long and 2 ft. high and wide and weighs about a hundred pounds completely empty. I have to pay extra if my bag completely full weighs more than 50 pounds. But I digress.

Grandma Jones's steamer trunk

 When Grandma Jones passed away, her steamer trunk came to live in our house. We put it in the basement, and Vic filled it with his treasures—all the cards he received from people over the years, keepsakes from IBM, awards and ribbons from his photography days, stuff like that. Even though it was in the basement, it had a huge presence in our house because Grandma Jones was a huge presence in the life of anyone who knew her. Like Vic's daughter, Laurie.

Laurie was the first of Grandma Jones's great-grandchildren (as Vic was the first of her grandchildren), and she adored Grandma Jones. (I mean, let's face it—everyone adored Grandma Jones. I only knew her for barely a decade and I still think of her every day, usually when I look at my wedding ring, because it is her diamond I wear with that ring.)

So it was only natural that when Vic passed away, Laurie was the one who wanted anything that came from Grandma Jones.

But how do you get a steamer trunk to Florida?

I found a lot of options through my old friend Google, but then I thought, what if I just took it to her myself? Vic and I drove to Florida once—it was not that hard. My family wants to go to Florida next year to go to Harry Potter World—what if I just drove to Florida, dropped off the trunk and spent a few days in Jacksonville with Laurie and the kids, drove down to Orlando, and then flew home?

A cross-country trip sounded great! So I set about planning one.

Step 1: Get mileage to Jacksonville. Google: 1,772.4 miles.

ALMOST EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES??? I swear it was not that far when Vic and I drove there. But, OK, 600 miles a day. How hard can that be? 

Step 2: Plan stops. So, Google wants me to take I-70, but if I take I-80, I can stop in Nebraska and visit my stepmom. Yes, it adds 50 miles and an extra day (what, I'm just going to spend the night? No! If I'm going to stop in Nebraska, I'm going to spend a day with my mom), but it's totally worth it. OK, so what's next? Well, last time we stopped in St. Louis, so I don't need to do that again. Nashville is on the way—I'll stop there. Yes, it is a very long drive from Nebraska to Nashville, and it adds an extra day (what, I'm just going to spend the night? No! If I'm going to stop in Nashville, I'm going to visit the Opry), but how often do you get to Nashville?

Step 3: Make a budget. Rental car: $1,000—wait, $1,000 for a rental car? That alone makes the trip cost-prohibitive—and we haven't even added at least six tanks of gas and at least two nights in a hotel! And what was I thinking, driving 1,772.4 miles by myself? When Vic and I took that trip, we split the driving: He drove 1,722.4 miles, and I drove 50. So there's no way I can make that trip in three days, which means more nights in a hotel, more food on the road, and—let's face it—probably a car accident because I fell asleep at the wheel or tried crocheting while I drove.

How much can it cost to ship the trunk?

Turns out FedEx has some pretty good options for half the cost of the rental car in the scenario above, and I have a friend, we'll call her Ethel to protect her privacy and because it works better for this story (in which I am Lucy, but to be honest, I'm not sure which of us is truly Lucy and which is Ethel), who says she will help me pack the trunk and get it ready.

Before that happens, though, I have to get the trunk out of the basement, which I can't do because (a) it weighs a million pounds and (b) it has been sitting in the same place for decades, soooooo bugs.

Fortunately, I have another friend, we'll call her Colleen because that's her name, and she thought the two of us could get that trunk upstairs, and although she showed me by example that a woman can clear spiders out of boxes, she also recognized that I was not ready for the amount of buggage on the steamer trunk so she cleaned that off for me. We got the trunk up the stairs without incident. (I should also mention that Colleen helped me with a lot of other stuff the day she came over “for lunch.” I have some pretty awesome friends.)

Colleen helped me “install” these birdhouse
decorations my neighbor Sam made.

 

 

Ethel comes over on Monday. I bring her everything for the trunk, and she packs it (she is a very good packer). My entire contribution is taping down the lock so it doesn't flap open during shipping. This will become a sticking point later, so to speak.

She starts ruminating on what we need to do to get the trunk ready to ship. Do we need a box? A pallet? How much can we put in the trunk to stay under the weight limit? She starts calling her shipping friends (who even has shipping friends??? Ethel) and she comes up with a plan. We don't need a box, but we'll need zip ties and bumpers. Ethel calls more of her shipping friends. No one has what we need. What can we use for bumpers? Pool noodles! (Ethel is very resourceful.) Where can we get pool noodles? Nowhere! (Resourcefulness only gets you so far.)

We decide to head to Lowe's to see what we can get there. But first, we have to get the trunk in the car. It is much heavier than when Colleen and I brought it up the stairs, and it was already ridiculously heavy then (but blissfully bug-free). Fortunately, we are able to slide it on my throw rugs to get it out the door, and then we rolled it over to the car (even though it's square, you can still roll it).

We put my throw rugs on the edge of the back of her car and are able to pick it up and slide it in. Yay! At this point, one of us mentions that it looks like we have a body in the trunk. I hope Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are not spying out their window and calling the cops.

We stop at Lowe's and find the zip ties there—but no pool noodles. Ethel (as usual) uses her noggin and gets an inspiration—pipe insulation! So we buy the zip ties and the pipe insulation and head over to the FedEx.

We get the trunk out of the car and realize we don't have anything to put an address on. I go in to see if the FedEx people have any paper and wait in line so long that Ethel comes to get me. This is when we start talking about the weight of the trunks. There is a 150 lb. limit to ship via FedEx Ground, which is our best option. We start talking to the FedEx people and they tell us to bring the trunk in. We put the trunk on the scale: 148.8 lbs. Lucy thinks, “Hallelujah!” But level-headed Ethel says, “That's too much.” Apparently, at any point on its journey, FedEx could weigh it and if it weighed in at more than 150 lbs., we would have a problem on our hands.

Ethel decides we can just take out a box we had packed inside one of the drawers of the steamer trunk. We take off the tape holding the lock down ... and the latch won't open. The tape, or perhaps the rolling, caused the latch to get stuck. (It certainly cannot be locked because we didn't use a key to lock it. It's totally just stuck.) This is where Lucy and Ethel really start to emerge. Ethel tries to turn the lock with a pair of scissors—and snaps the tip off in the lock. Lucy tries to use a different set of scissors to pry the latch open, which doesn't work because the scissors are too thick to fit between the latch and the trunk, so we can't get any leverage.

This goes on for several minutes before we finally decide to load the trunk back in the car and take it home, where I have many other tools that are much narrower.

We get the trunk home. I get some narrow flat screwdrivers and we start trying to pry the lock open again. No success. Ethel tries prying the hinge open. No success. We try digging the broken point of the scissors out of the lock. No success. Lucy gets her fancy magnet and tries to attract the broken point of the scissors. Success! Lucy and Ethel continue to try to turn the lock to see if that makes any difference in prying open the latch. Several different scenarios are all unsuccessful. Lucy and Ethel must have been quite a sight, lying in the back of an SUV trying to pry open a steamer trunk.

Lucy says, “I guess I could get the key.”

Ethel stops what she is doing and looks Lucy square in the face. “You have a key? WHY DIDN'T YOU MENTION THAT?”

“BECAUSE WE DIDN'T LOCK IT,” Lucy says.

“Get. The. Key.”

Lucy gets the key and repeats the “turn the lock while prying open the latch” exercise. No success. Lucy feels smug.

Ethel tries jiggling the key. Jiggling is a time-honored way of opening locks. The key turns an eighth of a turn. Ethel feels smug.

Long story short, eventually Ethel uses pliers to turn the key gently (not wanting a repeat of the “scissors breaking off in the lock” incident) while Lucy pushes down on the latch—AND THE KEY OPENS THE LOCK!

In short order, Lucy and Ethel take out the box and prepare it for separate shipment, Lucy makes address labels, Ethel tapes down the latch so it won't lock again—but puts the key in the extra box for good measure, they get the trunk back in the car, drive it back to FedEx and anxiously await the new number on the scale.

Winner winner chicken dinner!

Most special thanks go to my partner in crime, Ethel. This was the last of the big things I wanted to get done, and I was paralyzed with indecision until Ethel came aboard and took charge. I am pleased to report that the trunk has reached its destination, and my stepdaughter has been reunited with treasures that belonged her cherished grandmother.