Hemlock B Bootsalotta

Memorial dealt with and survived with the assistance of Xanax and dissociation.

So that's over with. Except for the, you know, Darrell being dead part.

Monday night Axe took me out and got me very very very drunk.

******************************

I got this for his ashes. (He loves scorpions.)

I won't wear it every day because it's a honkin' big thing. But it will be a thing I can wear when I want to.

******************************

Yesterday I did my first tour of a retirement apartment. I picked what I thought was the best one of the bunch to start with (this one fwiw) so I would have a basis for comparison when we start looking at more affordable units.

Some really good advice I got when I first started doing research is to watch the residents and see how much they interact with each other and the staff - a lot of people chatting and engaging with each other is a good sign that the people who live there are happy and active.

It passed with flying colours on pretty much all criteria. Multiple residents saw us with the staff and came over to tell us how great the place is. There is a ton of stuff to do, lots of social activities and lots of places to just hang out and interact with people, including several games rooms and a pub. The living space is a little smaller than they're used to, but that would be the case in any apartment. And all the apartments have a full kitchen, something that appears to be uncommon.

Literally the only downside is that it's expensive. Unfortunately money may be the factor that counts most.

I'm going to go through the list and pick out some others to check out, probably starting next weekend.

******************************

I walked into a barber shop near my house and gave him $20 to shave the sides of my head. I'd forgotten how much of a difference it makes to the amount of heat and weight on my head. It makes waiting for the bus in this weather marginally less unpleasant.

******************************

Work brought in some new software and now everything is broken. Second verse, same as the first.

You know those scenes in movies or tv shows where an individual is the team badass and they have to go into a meeting where they are not allowed weapons, and they just starting taking knives out of everywhere? Boots, sleeves, pockets, bags, vests, hidden in their hair, and the scene just keeps on going while the stack in front of them gets bigger and they just continue to take pointy objects out of increasingly improbable places?

Going through Darrell's stuff has been a lot like that.


...


(This is not a metaphor, I now own a rediculous number of knives.)

At one point when I was in the hospital with him, I told somebody I felt like I was trapped in amber. The only thing that changed was the colour of the light coming through the window. People came in and out, nurses did things, the phone blipped and beeped with calls and messages. Time stretched into infinity and I spent all of time inside a single beige room.

Meanwhile I fluttered around him like a moth, holding his hand, reading to him, talking to him, beating my wings against the glass while a candle slowly guttered out on the other side.

It still doesn't feel real. He spent three months at the hospital so it hasn't quite sunk in yet that he's not in the house. I'm not going to the hospital every day so now I have all this time on my hands and a huge to-do list and I'm seemingly incapable of connecting them to each other.

The funeral is on Wednesday. Maybe that's when it will finally hit me.

I will be OK. Everything will be OK. I have my partners, I have my friends, I have my family. Eventually life will stumble into something resembling normal. I will figure it out.

But in the meantime, I'm still trapped in amber.