For the first time in over a month, I have a free afternoon and I’m not ridiculously sick. It’s been such a hard month! And being sick was not even the half of it.
Where shall we start? Let’s start with the family drama. To all you parents out there – you know when your adult kid is contemplating doing something so obviously misguided that everyone (everyone!) knows it’s going to be a guaranteed disaster, but you’re powerless to stop it?
I’m sure my own parents have felt that way about some of the decisions I’ve made in my life! Well, it’s even worse is when it’s your kid’s partner who is the driver behind the catastrophic idea – because, let’s face it, we have less influence with their partners.
Guen latched onto a dream – a beautiful, ambitious, jaw-droppingly risky, and ultimately entirely unrealistic dream. She started down that road – and at first I watched warily, trying to stay neutral, expecting the grand idea to soon dissolve into the mist as completely unattainable dreams tend to do – but Guen is one determined cookie. (We have that in common.) Then I kept waiting for Callan to step in before all was lost. But that wasn’t happening either.
I waited and waited…I mean, what can a parent do? Stand aside and watch them hurtle towards the edge of the cliff, or say something and risk a relationship breach? And if you opt to say something, how hard do you push? This has been keeping me up at night.
Finally I couldn’t watch the train wreck any longer and called a family intervention meeting. Our schedules are impossible, so my hoped-for family meeting turned out to be me talking individually to everyone in an iterative fashion over several days. I talked to John. And then I talked to David (my ex, the kid’s dad). And I talked to Laura. And Laura talked to Alex. And I talked to Callan again. And Callan talked to Guen. And I talked to Mark. And I talked to Guen. And I talked again to David. And John again. And Laura again. And Callan about 5 more times.
I am happy to announce, we are all still talking to each other! Nobody hates anybody. And even better, this issue might have been resolved yesterday. Either that, or yesterday was just a brief, fleeting truce in a much longer ordeal. We will have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, on a completely different topic but almost as traumatizing, John and I have been having packrat issues. These awful little rodents are the scourge of the desert; more greatly feared by many of us than rattlesnakes, scorpions and gila monsters. They are larger than a house mouse, but smaller than a bonafide rat. They happily build nests under sprawling, prickly pear cactus or any sort of dense underbrush, but they prefer car engines.
First they caused $1,500 worth of damage chewing wires in my car. Then they tried to set up residence in our side yard amongst my gardening equipment. Then they tried to dig their way into the wall of our house!
This sounds impossible but our house is made of burnt adobe bricks, which are fired at a lower temperature than regular bricks, and are not a heck of a lot stronger than sandstone. They aren’t the dark red fired bricks those of you in the rest of the country are familiar with. I feel like I should be making a huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down joke right now, but it’s not quite coming to me. Scritch and scratch and claw my house down?
John is a complete do-it-yourselfer, so instead of calling an exterminator, John handled the packrat problem himself, then patched the hole in the wall with cement, and then left for a week long business trip. A day or two into his trip, he emailed me with the bad news that he had some sort of food poisoning or stomach bug. Meanwhile he was stubbornly continuing to go to his meetings. This annoyed me, because in my opinion he works too hard and doesn’t take care of himself, but primarily I felt bad for him.
The following day, I had even worse news for him then he had for me. Something was dead in the office wall. As a long-time homeowner and landlord, there are few words that strike such terror. And I’ve encountered a lot over the years. Skunk spray. A broken water pipe under the cement slab. A lurking rattlesnake. A live mouse dropping from a hole in the ceiling onto the dining room table. A dead cat in the crawl space under the house. Sewer gas from an undetermined location. Ants, cockroaches, termites, all kinds of leaks and floods. I’m not easily fazed, but this one did me in.
It was the memory of the dead cat in the crawl space over 25 years ago, that made me immediately realize that for sure, no kidding, something died in our wall. Nothing else smells like that. When John got home from his business trip the next day, he was still quite sick, but he valiantly went to work tearing up the adobe brick wall to find the issue.
What followed was an ordeal that I don’t want to go into. I will spare you the details. It was not nice. It was really, really not nice. At all. It was a freaking multi-day nightmare that involved moving everything out of the office, twice. Not to mention me looking for a hotel to rent.
Meanwhile, while John was digging in our wall looking for something dead, we were counting down the 4 short days before my sister, her husband, and their 4 little girls were flying all the way from Boston for their annual spring vacation at our house! In four days! Our house was not liveable. How was I going to find a last-minute rental house big enough for 8 people and a dog? With a heated pool?
Their visit is a highlight of our year. I spend days preparing. I pack away all my breakable ceramics and glass art and white wool rugs. Then we head to our storage unit to retrieve car seats, blow up beds, strollers, and bins and bins of bedding and children’s toys and pool toys. And food! I bought food and made a gigantic basket of snacks for the kids. John bought food to grill for everyone. Emily sent huge shipments of food staples, diapers and other necessities from Costco and Amazon.
Four days until the biggest event of the year at our house, and there’s a dead rat in the wall! After working non-stop all weekend, John finally managed to find and remove the dead packrat. Whew! But oh, our problems are not over yet.
John continued to still be quite sick, but stubbornly went to work on Monday morning, despite his illness and our nightmarish hunt for the dead thing in the wall over the weekend. But by Wednesday, the day before my sister’s arrival, he was still sick and I started feeling a bit of a tickle in my chest. I wondered – who ever heard of a cold that started in the chest? My colds always start with a sore throat and runny nose. What starts in the chest? Unless – suddenly I realized – could it be covid?
I asked John to stop at the store on the way home to pick up a covid test. Sure enough, John had covid! And my family was due to get on the plane at 4 AM the next morning!
I frantically texted her, but you know Emily. She shrugged it off. She’s an emergency room doctor, and she is exposed to covid and lord knows what else, all the time. She wasn’t going to let a little covid exposure stop them. Plus, they were bringing the tail end of some cold virus of their own with them. We were going to have a happy little germ party!
And did we ever. John recovered fairly quickly and was soon splashing in the pool with the children. But I was sick for their whole visit. And the day after they left, I spiked a fever so high I couldn’t believe it. I fevered for 4 days.
I coughed so hard I would grip my head to try to keep my poor aching brains from slamming into my skull with each cough. I lost my sense of smell. My ears completely clogged up. Meanwhile I kept testing negative for covid. I tested 5 times over the course of 10 days. Whatever it was, it was very bad, but it wasn’t covid.
At the end of a week and a half, after my virus had presumably run its course, I still had huge amounts of pain and pressure in my ears, so my doctor put me on antibiotics. Optimistic that I would soon be better with the antibiotics, John and I left for our long-anticipated vacation in San Diego. My doctor told me I was not to fly for fear I’d burst an eardrum with the pressure changes. But we were driving, not flying, so I figured my ears could tolerate it.
We had an ok vacation, but I could not smell anything, couldn’t taste anything, could not stop coughing, and my ears hurt and my hearing was badly impaired. And I was chronically exhausted. My doctor sent a second type of antibiotics halfway through the trip and I still was not getting any better. But it was a great trip! I mean, it had the potential to have been a great trip. It met the criteria for a great trip, in that it consisted of all the things we like! Never mind that I didn’t actually feel well enough to enjoy it. It was still in theory a great trip.
In the next couple of posts, I’ll tell you all about Emily’s visit and our San Diego vacation. Stay tuned, it gets better. (Eventually)
