Category: life

Speaking of doing things wrong

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Project Buy All The Things continues apace; this one was practically an accident, as we weren’t in the market for a new refrigerator until Lowe’s decided to put them on an absolutely ludicrous sale– this particular fridge was $800 off. This is the second new fridge we bought this week as the first one was too Goddamned big to be brought into the kitchen; they have a “will this fit?” tool on their website to avoid specifically that problem that I didn’t notice until after a very nice and patient delivery man, clearly expecting to get his ass chewed out, apologetically informed me that there was no way that they were going to get the damned thing into my kitchen. Various fuckery ensued and long story short an only slightly inferior refrigerator is now in our kitchen, although there were some scary moments getting this one in as well– I actually had to pull some trim from a doorway last night to ensure we had enough room, and even then it was about literally as tight as it could possibly be; you can see where the missing trim is in the doorway behind the fridge. I’ll put it back tomorrow. We’ll have to repaint a bit but we needed to do that anyway.

Those of you who are either particularly eagle-eyed or have a good memory will note that there is a nook that appears to be for a refrigerator on the left side of the picture there, and yet the New Hotness is rather oddly perched against a wall in the middle of the damn kitchen. The problem is that any fridge that fits into that space has to be smaller than we want it to be and we’re going to reno the kitchen eventually anyway, as soon as we get done paying off the bathroom we did last year. We just decided to jump on the fridge early. Yeah, it’s awkward, fuck it.

Tomorrow, I review a pillow. For at least the second time.

In which I’m doing this all wrong, somehow

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I had a conversation with a couple of former students a few weeks ago, at the end of June, and in that conversation one of them mentioned that their mother had had to leave town unexpectedly because their uncle was dying. I expressed sympathy and was, for a moment, rather taken aback at how little concern the student was showing. The explanation came a few moments later; they simply weren’t that close with that side of the family, and that particular uncle was someone they barely knew. Mom had apparently expressed her own lack of desire to leave and had done so purely out of a feeling of obligation.

I thought about it for a moment. I get it, I said. I have a few uncles myself who I probably wouldn’t mourn all that much.

My mother passed away in January of 2020. If you were to read her obituary, you would come upon the sentence Cremation will take place, and a celebration of life will occur at a later date. It is now July of 2023. That “later date” was meant to be a couple of months later, enough time to let everyone recover from the immediate shock and to give a family scattered across the country some time to gather.

You may be a step ahead of me in realizing what happened instead, and as of today my mother has never had a formal funeral. Her ashes– this is in accordance with her expressed wishes, for the record– are in my hallway closet, perhaps twenty feet from where I’m sitting right now. “You just keep me until Dad dies,” she told me, “and then scatter us somewhere.” She left no will or any other end-of-life instructions. Honestly, everyone just sort of took my word for it.

(That’s what she told me. I promise.)

Perhaps you have put two and two together already, given that I have yet to reveal the identity of the handsome gentleman who sits atop this post, and given said handsome gentleman’s fine taste in hats and facial hair. The same night– the exact same fucking night— I texted that sentence about having uncles who I probably wouldn’t mourn very much, I got a text from my brother that my uncle Bruce was dead. I don’t know the date of his death, and I doubt I ever will; he was found in his apartment, and I don’t know who by. My uncle Jim got in touch with my brother and he told me.

Bruce was my dad’s younger brother, by only a couple of years; he was 69 or 70, I think. Dad is the oldest of four, and Bruce was the second-born, followed by my aunt Lori and then Jim. Lori and Jim are far enough removed from my dad that Lori babysat us when we were kids, and I believe both still lived at home with my grandmother when my brother and I were very young. I have not spoken to Bruce or seen him in at least fifteen years, and I don’t think I’ve talked to Dad’s other siblings since the boy was an infant.

We just … don’t really talk to that side of the family, all that much. There are reasons. I won’t share them here– I’m sure you can find a way to forgive me– and honestly I probably don’t know them all.

Bruce lived in Chicago for most of his life. He lived there the entire time I was there, but I only saw him a few times during the near-decade we were both Chicagoans. He moved around a lot, spending a lot of time in Jamaica. He introduced me to Bob Marley’s music, instantly cementing himself as someone responsible for a chunk of my brain development in high school. He once brought back some hand-woven bracelets from Kingstown and gave one to my brother and I for Christmas, and in response to our nonplussed reactions offered us, rather grandly (Bruce did everything rather grandly), to provide us with the cash equivalent instead. Which was perhaps $2, if we were lucky. He may not have actually had that much cash on him, either. I remember him finding me reading the novelization of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and asking me if I enjoyed it, a question that somehow led to him taking the book from me and quizzing me about it. I remember this story because I didn’t know the answer to the very first question he asked, from the very first page of the book– he asked how old Lao Che was, and I insisted that information wasn’t in the book at all, which is how I learned that the phrase pushing fifty means that one is nearly fifty years old.

I would guess he’s about my age or a little older in that picture up there, which would make it twenty-ish years ago. I’m not on Facebook, but his profile is public, and I was able to find his page and scroll through his pictures. And the thing is, I have no idea what he might have been fighting or struggling with toward the end of his life, but the most recent pictures were shocking. He’d lost a ton of weight, his beard now halfway down his chest and whiter than mine is. And he was old; that feeling would be inevitable given how long it had been since I’d seen him, but my dad’s younger brother now looked to have a decade on him at least. He looked like he’d been sick for a while when he passed. I have no idea what might have been wrong. He never mentioned anything being wrong, never said anything about a hard day, or being tired, or not feeling well.

The caption on nearly half the pictures? It’s a wonderful day to be alive. He had friends; there were tons of pictures of him with other people and lots of references to people and tags back and forth. But that quote kept coming up over and over again. It’s a wonderful day to be alive.

And now he is gone, and I’ve barely talked to him in two decades, and I somehow miss him anyway. I never missed him when he was alive. What kind of person does that make me? I don’t know.

We gave my uncle some time to get back to us about some sort of service and then, having heard nothing, I asked my brother to reach out to him again. Jim had said that he was going to go to Chicago to clean out his apartment and settle his affairs, which I suspect was not as big of a job as it might seem. He took a while to respond. He’d been busy with last-minute details for his son’s wedding– a wedding that no member of my family had been invited to– and said that “his cousins” were having a get-together later that week that he couldn’t attend. This is a direct quote: “There will probably be some reflection on Bruce’s life then.” Did my aunt come up from Florida for the wedding? They live in Michigan, not far from us. He didn’t go to this “get-together.” If the two of them were together recently, they did not bother to reach out to my father or to my brother and I.

My mother never got a funeral. Bruce, it seems, isn’t even going to get an obituary. My grandmother is buried in South Bend; my grandfather, who passed away when I was very young, is buried in a family plot in Arkansas. I have no idea whether he left any instructions about what to do with his remains when he was gone (and I kind of doubt it; Bruce was not a planner) and burying his ashes with his mother seems to be the cleanest solution, but right now I have no idea what’s become of him. I don’t know how he died. I don’t know when he died.

He mentioned having a cat, in one of the pictures. I hope one of his friends has it.

But hey. The cousins got together. There was probably some reflection.

I guess that’s going to have to be enough.

Guess where I am?

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’ll give you a whole dollar if you can find me!

47

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.

But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.

(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)

Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:

It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:

That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.

I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.

The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.

Anyway. On to 48, I suppose. Sigh.

Some updates

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I have created an account at Bluesky— you can find me over there at @infinitefreetime.bsky.social— and so far I’m enjoying the place. It’s Twitter, basically; most of the differences are on the back end where the end-user is never going to see or notice them, and the main thing is that Elon Fucking Musk doesn’t own it. I’m trying to reconstruct my Twitter lists as much as possible; the lack of actual verification is a bit of a problem right now but since it’s still a small service and invite-only, impersonators aren’t really an issue. Hopefully it stays that way. I don’t have any invites yet, but if I happen to get a bunch I’ll let people know.

I drove to Indianapolis and back yesterday (well, went to Indianapolis round-trip; my wife did the driving on the home leg) came home, took a nap, and then that was pretty much my day. Today was the second day in a row my blood sugar level has gotten low enough to kick my ass and both times there have had to be naps afterward. I have a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks and I’m really hoping that she agrees to let me have a continuous glucose monitor because I’m tired of poking holes in my fingertips. I’ve mostly got my numbers under control right now– mostly through eating better– but getting low really sucks and the idea that a CGM warns you that it’s heading that way before you feel it really sounds like a good thing.

My birthday is the 5th. Buy me something. I’m going to be 47, and Christ, 47 feels old in a way 46 really didn’t.

Speaking of 47, now I’m looking at this and my brain is melting because I know I had a couple more things I wanted to talk about — Oh! I have officially been gifted a Prone Pillow, and it ought to be here in a few days, so you can look forward to that. I’ve been sent plenty of free books and ARCs over the ten years I’ve been doing this blog but I think this is the first time anyone has sent me any other kind of consumer goods to review. I have to admit to being slightly ashamed of myself– I wrote the dude back to say that I thought it was ridiculous for him to say my blog’s demographics were a “perfect match” for his product when I didn’t know my site’s demographics, and he pointed out that I’m an author and therefore my blog probably has a lot of people who like reading looking at it, and reading while lying on your stomach is one of the major use cases for his pillow.

Uh, yeah, that’s … that, uh, makes sense, and … uh … I’m kinda dumb sometimes okay shut up. Anyway, it’ll be here Friday or thereabouts so expect a review next week sometime.

I still feel like I’m forgetting something, but that’s what editing is for. Try not to blow any body parts off tomorrow, y’all.

What a weird day

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

My day started with a visit to my dermatologist, who is a lovely person. I only have a dermatologist because I asked my doctor once to check out a mole that is located on my back and squarely in the middle of a tattoo; she made me a referral out of an excess of caution and since then once a year in June or July I get way closer to naked than I’m comfortable with in a room sometimes containing as many as three other people (only two, this time) and they pore over damn near every inch of me– way too much, one way or another– with those little flashlights dermatologists use. As of yet there have been no issues, and as I don’t encounter the sun unless absolutely necessary, skin cancer really isn’t very high on my list of health concerns. My dad has had a few suspect moles removed, I think, but I have considerably fewer moles than he does.

When she came in today, I referred to my visits with her as the most awkward fifteen minutes of my year, which is a virtual guarantee that my regular doctor will insist on a prostate exam when I see her in July. Stand by for that one; it’ll be fun for everybody.

The rest of my day was taken up with interviews for the open assistant principal position at my school. I haven’t fully written out all of the rules for the Assistant Principal Interview Drinking Game, but if you sip every time you hear the word relationships and finish your drink whenever you hear servant leader, you will be fucking dead by the end of the game. This is the second round of first round interviews, since the first time around we went to two different people and offered them the job and they both went elsewhere, so we had to start the search over. I think we had two really solid candidates out of the batch, so hopefully one of them ends up still being available at the end of the week when we make an offer.

Also, if you get asked “What would you do if you witnessed one student bullying another student,” and your reaction is to freeze for ten seconds while you consider your answer to this utter fucking softball of a question, you may consider yourself instantly eliminated from the competition. You had to know there were questions about bullying coming. Had to.

Anyway, now I’m exhausted. I conked out on the couch for about half an hour after I got home, then got up and had dinner, and now that my Computer Tasks are done for the night. Tomorrow morning is another four hours of meetings with the honors teachers and then I think I’ve got the rest of the week to myself.

Here we go again

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

It’s confirmed. Devon Green, a 23-year-old former student of mine, passed away in his sleep two days ago. That’s all anyone knows at the moment. His family is struggling to pay for the funeral; there’s a GoFundMe. If anybody happens to have a few spare nickels with nothing to use them on, donations would be greatly appreciated.

In which I’ve accomplished something

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Okay, on some sort of Absolute Scale of Adulthood, successfully installing a ceiling fan at my dad’s house is probably not at or near the top of the scale. But as far as I know the damn thing is solidly installed, working properly, and isn’t going to come flying off of the walls or collapse or anything like that, and now there is both light and moving air in Dad’s kitchen again (we’re not going to talk about how long it took for this to get done, especially since it diminishes the actual achievement itself) and as far as I know the only thing that really still needs to be done is painting that patch of naked drywall up there that was underneath the original fan.

I mean, y’all, this involved wiring and everything. Wiring is scary! And I only had to go back to Lowe’s once, because I forgot to bring a wire stripper from my house and Dad didn’t have one, and Lowe’s was closer than going back to my house for mine. I thought for a few minutes that I was going to have to install a junction box but it turns out I didn’t have to, so all good there.

And then I got home and found out another former student had died, or at least that’s the rumor; the kid moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago so right now it’s all rumor mill shit and no one who I still talk to has any idea what happened. If I remember right this kid was a year ahead of Makyi’s class, and if I’m being honest I don’t remember him all that well, so it’s not hitting me nearly as hard, but … Christ, between this and everything going on in America this week the emotional whiplash has been a motherfucker and I would really like the world to calm the fuck down for a couple of weeks. It’s enough.