Shine On You Crazy Diamond

December 2010

Christmas was approaching and quite frankly, neither of us were feeling very festive. I wasn't planning on decorating our tree but it occurred to me that this could very well be his last Christmas and I had a change of heart. So I set it up and halfheartedly hung some ornaments on it. Every one wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas, and they'd ask me what I thought my sweetie wanted. I had no fucking clue. I mean really what do you buy a dying man for Christmas? I offered up some suggestions. Slippers? A warm fuzzy robe? Maybe an I-Tunes card so he could buy some music for his mp3 player? For my part, I decided to make him a 'bacon pillow'. I was inspired by the bacon plush toy in the Think Geek catalog - I would have just gotten that one but I honestly didn't think it would get here in time, so I just made my own from white and maroon colored fleece material. The hard part was making it without him seeing it. While he was sitting in the living room watching TV, I smuggled the materials into the bedroom and told him he couldn't come in until I said it was ok. Of course he found many excuses to have to come in anyway and every time he did I would quickly throw a blanket over my work so he wouldn't get a look at this latest project of mine. He was very curious to know what exactly I was doing in there. I sat on the bed working as fast as I could - cutting out the pieces, hand stitching them together and finally stuffing it full of polyfill. When it was done I didn't even bother wrapping it - I just went out into the living room and gave it to him. Fuck waiting for Christmas.
He sat there looking at it for a few minutes before finally asking "Is this....bacon?"
Me grinning: "Yes! It's a bacon pillow!"
Him laughing: "That's freaking awesome!"
Me: "So...do you like it then?"
Him: "Yes!"
He noted it was the perfect size for the arm of the couch and threw it behind his neck and tried it out. "It's very soft and squishy!"
Me: "I'm glad you like it! I had no idea what to get you for Christmas and this was the best idea I came up with."
Him: "I love it! I have the best sweetie ever!"
And then he gave me a kiss and snuggled up with his new pillow to take a nap with his Minion. I chalked it up as a win.

So many people dropped by to visit that month and every time someone did, sweetie would put on a smile and make an effort to sit up and chat with them. He was always a very social dude. But as soon as they left - it was time for drugs and a solid nap. I could see that the visits were starting to take it out of him, but he was happy to see them and they rarely stayed too long. I had quickly gotten used to him being bald, but I could see it was a shock for friends and family who hadn't been around as much.
Former roommate #2 came over one night with a bottle of Iron Maiden wine - Eddie's Evil Brew. He asked sweetie if he'd like a glass, and sweetie said 'no' but he'd like a little to taste. Former roommate poured a tiny bit into a glass for him so he could sample it and sweetie immediately noticed his tolerance for alcohol had gone way down - either that or it was some wickedly strong stuff because he said he'd gotten a mild buzz from that small sip.

When we didn't have visitors, I was doing the usual stuff. Messing around on my computer, running loads of laundry, daily trips up to the corner store for more ice and gatorade, hauling out the trash, fixing stuff for him to eat, sorting pills into the pillbox and making sure he got them on schedule. The steroids were still working their magic - his appetite was still good.

In between all of that I would try to get a little sleep or work on the little fairy house I started building. His family members were amazed by that little project and he liked showing them the latest tiny items I'd sculpted for it. "Isn't that cool?" he'd ask them. They seemed to understand that it was somehow helping me to cope with the shitstorm our lives had turned into. For Christmas I received several gift cards from them to buy more building materials for it at the craft store. I was able to get so much stuff that I expanded the project to include a small yard and garden. My friend Purple Haired Girl added to it by crocheting tiny things using a very small hook and embroidery thread. She made a little rug, a blanket for the bed, a little lacy tablecloth and the worlds smallest granny square afghan for the tiny sofa I'd sculpted. She also made some small 'family portraits' out of clay to hang over the little mantle.

One evening I was making some meatballs for him (thanks for the recipe Alton Brown!) and he came out to the kitchen to help like he usually did. I'd roll the meat into a ball and he'd coat them with breadcrumbs and put them on the baking sheet. Sometimes he'd just hang out while I was cooking and keep me company. One of those times he was standing by the back door as I was cooking and I suddenly caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. Startled, I turned around and there he was, leaning against the door jam puffing a cigarette. We had both quit, cold turkey, a year earlier - he in December, and me about a week later when he'd gotten his diagnosis. I found myself tearing up at the sight. I wasn't too upset about him having a smoke at this stage of the game. I just joined him by the door and asked if I could have a drag. Fuck, it tasted good. *sigh*

He had another appointment with his oncologist who gave us a bunch of new prescriptions. There wasn't one for the steroids and I told him we needed a refill on those. He said he was taking him off the steroids. I wanted to know why - they were helping with his appetite, that had to be a good thing. I don't remember the reason he gave, just that I thought it was bullshit. About a week later his appetite was declining and he was once again picking at his food. The weight he'd gained began to disappear and his energy levels dropped radically. I was pissed off and blamed the doctor for this decline. 

A few days before his next chemo appointment, the cancer center called and said they needed to reschedule him. They moved the appointment from the day before Christmas to the Monday after it. "Good" I thought, at least he won't be feeling like dog snot on Christmas. On the 27th, we went in and they did the usual blood test before his dose. A little while later they came out and said he couldn't get chemo that day - he was too dehydrated. I wondered how that could be possible with all the water and gatorade he was drinking. Instead, they put us in a back room and hooked him up to an IV and gave him some fluids for a few hours. He was rescheduled for chemo on the 29th. When we went in for that appointment, they said he was too weak to get chemo that day too. They gave him more IV fluids and rescheduled him again for January. While we were there, a nurse came in and started talking to us about 'quality vs. quantity' of life, and we went home feeling thoroughly defeated.

On New Years Eve, he crawled into bed around 10pm and stayed there for most of January.
 

Cliffs of Dover

2008

We had moved into our new house and gotten settled in. For some reason this place really brought out my creative side and I wasted no time in getting it decorated and making it feel like home. After living in a single room studio apartment for fourteen years, this place felt like a palace! Since the walls in the new house are plaster, I couldn't just pound a nail and hang a picture. My Sweetie informed me that pounding a nail would make the plaster crack and fall. So he unpacked his drill and drilled pilot holes and screws for me to hand things on. All I had to do was tell him where I wanted to hang something and he took it from there. I discovered that all the art I had on the walls at our old place didn't take up much space in the new house - I had all of it hanging up and the walls still looked naked. Before the first week was over, I had shelves and art up on the walls, furniture arranged, and everything unpacked. Then I set about shopping for more stuff to create new art to fill the empty space. My Mother in Law gave us some furniture to help fill the place out too.

With so much new space to fill, I told him to go ahead and install some guitar hangers on the walls so he could hang them in the living room instead of taking up floor space with stands. They're still hanging there now. Our old bathroom was tiny and we couldn't both be in there without banging into each other, in contrast our new one is huge and all four of us could be in there at the same time and still have room to spin around! But it was big, white and blank - so I decided to decorate it too. Years earlier, Sweetie had spent some time in Hawaii and he loved it there so I decided on a beach theme and put up pictures of palm trees (gifts from my Mother in Law), scattered some seashells around and got some palm tree shaped candle holders. My Mom had given me a glass clown fish night light and it fit right in in there. Over the next few months I added little things here and there - a ship in a bottle, a silk flower lei...

All of this made the little hallway outside the bathroom look completely naked, and that bothered me. I had an idea for the space though - I wanted to string wire back and forth up by the ceiling and hang a whole bunch of Christmas balls from it. I told my Sweetie about this plan and he thought it sounded cool and offered to help as he always did. I got permission from The Dungeon Master and The Purple Haired Girl before starting. Dungeon Master readily agreed, the Purple Haired Girl was less enthusiastic about it but gave her blessing as well. So Sweetie and I went off to the home improvement store to pick up the materials for me to do it. I picked up some quarter round molding, wire, screws and a package of small eye screws. We got home and Sweetie hopped up on a ladder and installed the molding for me, and then I installed the eye screws and wire. Then I unpacked my Christmas balls and with Sweetie sitting in the living room guiding me so I could distribute the colors evenly, I started hanging them on the wire. In the process, I discovered I didn't have as many Christmas balls as I thought I had - even so, it looked very cool and sparkly. We put the word out among our friends and family that we needed more of them for an art project, and they obliged. People would stop by with a small handful of them and I'd haul the ladder out and hang them up. My Mother in Laws husband, the Retired Priest, gave us a little table and I set it in the hallway with a small lamp on it. The light from the lamp made the ornaments twinkle and shine...

Meanwhile, our old management company was very unhappy with us. Our departure had left them with a nearly empty building and they were trying to say that we didn't give them enough notice and hey threatened us with legal action saying we owed them three months rent. Oh hell no! None of us had an active lease with them when we moved, and since I was the caretaker there - I know none of us was behind on our rent. We gave a month notice (all that was legally required of us) and we cleaned our empty apartments, but they were refusing to give us our damage deposits and threatening to sue us for unpaid rent. *sigh* We contacted a lawyer of our own, who told us they (management) didn't have a legal leg to stand on, and Purple Haired Girl fired off a letter in response. Then they refused to send us our tax forms (illegal). After much back and forth we finally decided to say piss on it. Let them keep the deposits. If they still wanted to take us to court, we'd show up with our info and paperwork and they'd likely lose. Ultimately though, we just wanted to be done with them. In the meantime, I filed a complaint against them with the state for failing to send out our tax forms by the deadline. I hope they got audited. Anyway, the whole thing was causing oodles of stress and we had more important things to worry about, like our housewarming party and the impending wedding in August of my friends The Dungeon Master and The Purple Haired Girl.

Since we moved in January, and January in Minnesota is arctic, we decided to wait until spring to have a housewarming party. That way we could have the doors and windows open and we could cook some burgers out on the grill. The party went off without a hitch and we had a really good turnout for it. Lots of tasty food and many well-wishers. Everyone said the new place was really cute and a huge improvement over our old one. One of my Sweeties cousins came over to see the new place and as he was showing him the house I heard him say to my Sweetie "Chicks really make a place look nice, don't they?" Sweetie grinned and gave me a wink. I was pretty proud - that was high praise from his cousin.

With the housewarming party out of the way, the next thing on our agenda was wedding planning...
Dungeon Master and Purple Haired Girl had a shoestring budget for their wedding and to stretch their money farther everyone was being pressed into service in one way or another. Purple Haired Girl's dad is a pretty good gardener and all the flowers for the wedding came from his garden. A friend of Purple Haired Girl is a florist and volunteered her services arranging all of them. She created the bridal bouquet, boutonnieres, aisle decorations and table centerpieces (all were beautiful). Purple Haired Girl's grandma created a really gorgeous wedding dress for her, as well as the brides' maids dresses (which were also very pretty). Dungeon Master made and decorated their wedding cake, and Purple Haired Girl made the toppers out of fimo clay - a little froggy groom and a little hedgehog bride (their totem animals). They made their own wedding invitations (and I had a very small part in their creation). My sweeties sister used to do make-up for a living and did Purple Haired Girl's hair and make-up on her wedding day (and she looked lovely). The reception music was courtesy of Dungeon Master's ipod and the church hall's speaker system (which was much better than you might think).

The big shocker, for me anyway, was that they asked me to be their photographer. At first I was hugely flattered – and then I was completely freaked out and scared to death. I explained that while I was willing to try, my camera with its pathetic 2.1 mp was not up to the task. It does ok on outdoor shots, but it's old and banged up and a huge battery pig. It is not by any means a camera you would want your wedding photos taken with, and bad wedding pictures can totally ruin a friendship. Excuses, excuses. But they insisted. They had confidence that I would do a good job, and they offered to get me a camera to use that was up to the task. I reluctantly agreed. They told me to research which camera they should buy and get back to them. I knew immediately I wanted a canon digital rebel but they were still pretty expensive. So I went with the next best one I could find – an 8 mp canon powershot sx100. Still spendy, but much more in their price range. Her dad bought it for them as a wedding present and I got it with about a month left to learn how to make the most of it. This thing has more bells and whistles than the Titanic…so for the next month I took tons of pictures. Of anything and everything, inside and outside, day and night. Just trying to learn the ins and outs of this new camera. I took pictures at Purples bridal shower (and endured a slightly traumatizing incident with the stripper her friends hired.) I went to the rehearsal too so I could take some practice shots in the church. I also read up on everything I could find having to do with wedding pictures and how to take good ones.
I thought for sure I was going to have heart failure and die before the wedding.
On the day of the wedding I was (again) a picture taking fool. I took at least two pictures of everything just in case the first one didn't turn out, and I had no clue where the best place to stand was so I could get good pictures and not be in anyone's way, so I kept moving around. My assistant (former roommate Pine City Girl) was late and I was certain that none of my pictures were going to come out. Fortunately she arrived before the service was over so I had her to help me with the portraits afterward. She was invaluable – seriously. Pine City Girl handled all of the 'getting people grouped and shuffled into place' posing stuff and all I really had to do after that was get them all framed up and in focus. The only problem I ran into there was that I couldn't get my tripod to fully extend. But the pictures were beautiful (I had to fix a little red eye here and there because of the tripod height but other than that, they were great) and my friends were happy. It was a beautiful wedding.

Our new place was bursting with creativity and life! My Sweetie turned the garage into his man den and spent days out there playing guitar with his buddies and tinkering with his motorcycle. I still remember sitting on the deck and listening to him play Cliffs of Dover. We filled the front boulevard with tiger lilies from a patch growing wild in the backyard of Sweeties Grandpa. We put a little garden in the back yard, and with my Sweeties help I built a little container garden up on our rear deck. We liked to sit out there on the deck and enjoy a recreational smoke in the evenings as the sun was going down. Sweetie was an early riser and he liked to sit out there and drink his coffee in the mornings while water the plants. It felt like a quiet and secluded place, we both loved it. It was around this time though that his shortness of breath turned into a persistent cough.

Since we were now so close to both Sweeties Grandpa and his Aunt, calls from them to come over and help with this or that were frequent. Sweetie had a green thumb and Grandpa would have him come over and plant flowers for Grandma. His Aunt was one of our smoking buddies, so our trips over there were usually more social. One day though, his Aunt called and Sweetie went completely white, said he'd be right there and raced out the door. When he returned home later, he told me his cousin had died - an anti-depressant overdose - and his Aunt was hysterical. His cousin lived down in Texas and he would drive his Aunt down there for the funeral. He called me every single day while he was gone, and came back with a memorial tattoo in honor of his cousin. He and his cousin had grown up together and were like brothers. It was a sad time. His Aunt turned to one of the buddies of Sweetie and his cousin for support and let him move in over at her place. For a while we thought it was a good thing but eventually it became apparent that the guy was taking advantage of the situation. We all wanted him to find his own place and move out, but he refused and despite problems between the two, Sweeties Aunt wouldn't kick him out. This led to a family fight, and Sweetie washed his hands of it all. She wouldn't stand up for herself, nor would she listen to the rest of her family. Sweetie and his Aunt stopped talking after that.

We took a trip up to our favorite campsite that year, just the two of us this time. We only went for a weekend, and noticed that the place looked like it had barely been used since the last time we were there - but that was one of the reasons we loved the place. I remember that we did the usual stuff, sat by the fire, did a little fishing, climbed the big rock outcrop, looked for Kermit the Gargoyle we left there years before and had a smoke in our favorite smoking spot. When we packed up to leave we sat for a while on one of the picnic tables and had another smoke while watching the river. We spotted a group of friendly Canadians on the other side and waved at them, and they in turn waved back. We talked about the next time we'd come up... But there was a weird air of finality to it, like we'd never make it up there again and I couldn't figure out why.

Back home, life went on with its ups and downs. We discovered one of our kitties had a brain tumor and had to have her put down, leaving us with three cats. One of Dungeon Master and Purple Haired Girls kitties also died unexpectedly. We made friends with a neighborhood stray cat that had the unique habit of climbing our roof and jumping up to our window to ask to be let inside. We figured he might have lived here before we moved in. Sweetie and Former Roommate #2 went to concerts. Friends visited daily.

One day the Greasemonkey came over with some more Christmas balls for my ceiling project. I was up on the ladder hanging them up when I noticed that one of the molding pieces was bowed out from the wall. I mentioned it to Sweetie and he hopped on the ladder to try and fix it and SNAP! The molding broke and Christmas balls rained down to the floor popping like little grenades! He was so apologetic - he thought it was his fault. I wasn't angry at him though. I sent him to grab a box and then I carefully took the remaining balls down and loaded them into it, swept up the glass on the floor and dismantled the network of wire and molding. Then I went and sat on the couch and stared at the now empty ceiling. Sweetie looked at me and said "You're trying to figure out how to redo it, aren't you?"
"Yep."
"It's my fault" he said.
Me: "How's it your fault?"
Him: "I knew that wasn't the right material for the job, but I didn't stop you from buying it."
Me: "Mmmm."
Him: "We should have used dimensional lumber."
Me: "Yeah?"
Him: "Yeah. And if we use square chicken wire mesh, we can distribute the balls more evenly."
Me: "We don't have many balls left...I think I have less of them now than when we started."
Him: "We'll get more."
Me: "Cool!"
And we sat there chatting about how much better it would be when we re-did it. He never told me one of my ideas was stupid, and he always tried to help. I loved him for that.

Drift Away

November...
My Sweetie was home from the hospital and he still had several days of radiation to complete before they would consider another round of chemo. His favorite kitty The Minion was happy to see him return and was constantly laying on him or next to him, determined not to let him out of his sight. Our friend the Greasemonkey had gotten my car running again and I was once again making the daily drive down to the cancer center to get his head zapped. In addition to the radiation, the doctors had prescribed an assortment of new drugs for him to take. So many pills... I now had a new job, counting out pills into his pillbox and making sure he took all of them on schedule. There was both Vicodin and Oxycontin, there was an anti-seizure med and an anti-depressant, an anti-nausea med, an anti-inflammatory med, a stool softener and a steroid. He was taking upwards of 10 pills every 6 hours or so...

The radiation left him feeling tired and he spent a lot of time napping on the couch, but when he was awake he was in pretty good spirits. Then one day a few days into the radiation his hair started coming out. It was just like you see in the movies. He was sitting there and he ran his hand through his hair and it just came out in a big clump. He sat there for a moment looking at the handful of hair and then he got an idea. He got up and went out onto our deck and tossed it into the air. Then he pulled another clump, and another...he figured maybe the birds would use it to build their nests. When there wasn't anymore coming out that way, he came back inside and called his sister and asked her to come over with a hair clipper to take off the rest. He didn't want to be walking around shedding hair everywhere, might as well go all the way and just shave it off. I thought I'd be sad to see him bald, but I really wasn't that broke up about it. As far as I was concerned, he was still a good looking guy even without his hair - besides, we were expecting it to fall out anyway. We just thought it would be the chemo that did it, not the radiation. Both his sister and I took it in stride. If he wasn't upset about it, why should we be? We swept up the pile of ginger hair and put it in a bag. The news of his hair loss had his mother whipped into a hand wringing frenzy though, and she requested a few locks as a keepsake. No problem. We put some of it into a baggy and sent it off with his sister. Now that he was bald, his head was cold so he started wearing the cap that the Purple Haired Girl had crocheted for him. He requested a matching neck scarf and she obliged. Because of his bald head and goatee, I jokingly started calling him Heisenberg because of his sudden resemblance to the character in Breaking Bad.

When his radiation treatments were over the staff gave him the cancer mask they made to hold his head in place. He gave it to the Purple Haired Girl with the idea that she could use it to make a new 'monster' for our friend The Gamer's haunted yard using it and paper mache. He also gave her the bag of hair to go with it. We liked the idea that he could keep scaring people during Halloween for years to come.

After the radiation, he had another scan done along with a follow up appointment at the cancer center. We were surprised to discover that he had gained some weight, a side effect of the steroids he was on. They increased his appetite - he was eating good for the first time in a long time and the extra weight looked good on him, he was less gaunt and looking healthier. The doctor gave the green light for the chemo and he was scheduled for his first dose a few weeks later. He was looking forward to it since it was so helpful the last time.

One day when his Dad was coming over, Sweetie gave me the heads up that I'd probably want to go out for a while. It wasn't just his Dad that was coming over, but some hospice people were coming too. They were going to work out his end of life plans - what he wanted done and how he wanted to be treated when the time came that he could no longer speak for himself. He knew if I was home while this was going on I'd be a blubbering mess by the time they left, and he was probably right. So I went out and got some bubble tea, and went over to my friend RottieMama's house to wait it out. When I got home I asked him to fill me in. He said his Dad had power of attorney, that they did the paperwork for when he would go into hospice and that there would be no life extending measures taken. As far as he was concerned, when it was time to go - it was time to go. He was adamant that he did not want IV's or tubes of any kind whatsoever. He had noted my discomfort when I woke up with a catheter after surgery a few years earlier and didn't want to experience that himself. "Good call" I said, "Because that thing sucked. It was uncomfortable and I was pretty pissed off about it." "Exactly" he replied. The hospice people had tried to talk him into moving into the first bed that came available and he'd said no. He told them that at the moment he still felt fine and wanted to stay home with me as long as he could. They warned him there might not be a bed available when he needed it and he said he'd take that chance.

Then his chemo appointment came around and it was back down to the cancer center. Our Keep Calm and Carry On shirts had arrived and we decided to wear them - the cancer center staff asked about them and thought they were pretty cool. His dosage was much bigger this time - instead of the two and a half hours per appointment that we had last time, it would take six hours of sitting in the chair waiting for the stuff to drip into him. And it wasn't just that there was more of it, but this time the dose was stronger as well. When he was done, I got his next appointment set up - it would be the day before Christmas. After we got home he felt sick and just wanted to lay down, a far cry from the first time we'd done this when he came home and played his guitar for an hour. The next day he felt worse and didn't want to eat. He was thirsty though and wanted gatorade, so I ran up to the store and got him some. The Minion wanted to cuddle up with him and he felt so bad that he grumbled and shoved him away. "No dude, I hurt." So the Minion compromised by curling up on the back of the couch instead and dangled a paw down, just barely touching Sweetie with it.

At this point Sweetie wasn't up to doing much of anything, so I took over. I made frequent trips to the store for bags of ice, more gatorade, more soda, more bottled water - he was constantly thirsty, jello, soup, and these little microwave dinners that he wanted. I ran the laundry up and down from the basement every other day so he'd have clean dry clothes because he would wake up soaking wet from sweating. I ran to the pharmacy to get his prescriptions and fielded phone calls from his friends and relatives - 'No, he's really not up for company today - check back in a day or two. I'll tell him you called.' I sorted meds into the pillbox and when the mystery man came, I'd turn off the alarm and make sure he got whichever ones he was supposed to get at that time and log them in a little notebook.

A few days later he was feeling a little better and actually sitting up on the couch, snuggling his favorite cat and receiving visitors again. When we didn't have visitors, he entertained himself texting his friends and we sat around watching TV together - Top Gear, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, South Park.

To keep my sanity, I started making a little fairy cottage out of clay. Sweeties Mom was driving me somewhat insane with her emails and phone calls and apparently she was starting to get to the Purple Haired Girl too. One evening while she was sitting upstairs with us, she received a text from Sweeties Mom asking her (yet again) to sing a certain song at his wake. Purple Haired Girl read it and gave a heavy sigh - Sweetie had already said he didn't care for that song...she'd said she'd rather not, so why the hell was she pushing this? It was maddening, but I was somewhat relieved to learn that it wasn't 'just me' feeling irritated by her behavior and requests.

One evening around this time, the Purple Haired Girl came running excitedly upstairs and showed us a positive pregnancy test. We wanted to be happy for her, we really did - but with our current situation we just couldn't muster much excitement. And then a few days later, when Sweeties sister was over for a visit we committed the unpardonable sin of still not being excited when we told her about it. We did say that we were happy for Purple and wished her the best, but we also said we thought the timing felt horrible. Sweeties sister said nothing about this to us, but as soon as she got home she texted Purple and said she heard the good news - too bad the 'grumpy people' upstairs hate kids. I guess she said a few other things too, but that was the gist of it: 'We hate babies and wouldn't want to be her friend anymore.' After receiving this text, a hormonal and visibly upset Purple Haired Girl came upstairs to ask me if we were not going to be friends anymore just because she was pregnant. "Wait, what?! Where would you get that idea?" I asked. And she sobbingly told me about the text that Sweeties sister had sent. The way I heard it, 'Sis' made it sound like it was all me and that Sweetie hadn't said anything - in any case Purple addressed me about it alone. I did my best to reassure her that, yes, she would still be my friend and I didn't harbor any ill will toward her or the baby. I explained that 'Sis' had it in for me because she thought I 'hated' her (I didn't). To prove my point, I gave Purple the Christmas gift I bought for her the day before - nearly a month early. It was a glittery green fairy ornament that caused her to squeal happily. "There" I said. "Would I buy you a fairy if I hated you? Do you believe me now?" She said she did.

Later, I filled her in on all the Sister drama we'd had and said she was probably trying to stir up trouble for me. She'd been in a bit of a twist because I opted out of too many family gatherings over the years, I never made an effort to meet her kid (She's overly permissive. Sweetie had said he was allowed to run amok and if he wasn't his nephew he wouldn't want to hang out with him either) and then when her brother got sick and she wanted him to come live with her - he chose me. To this day, I suspect that she was hoping Purple would be so angry that she'd kick us out and then Sweetie would of course come live with her and "finally have a real family." (She actually said that back when he got his diagnosis! He told her he did have a 'real family' over here and me, Purple and the Dungeon master were it.) For his part, my Sweetie actually called her up and went to my defense. He pointedly told her that the only thing she should have said to Purple was "I heard the good news, congratulations!" and that she had no business repeating anything else we said - we had both had a bad day and were simply venting our frustration even if it was misdirected. Sis completely denied saying anything at all. Really?! Then why would Purple come upstairs and say she said it? And Purple still had the text to prove it. And still she denied saying a thing. Ah the drama in that family. Is it any wonder that I opted to skip their gatherings?

The Crying Machine

Sorry for the delay, I've been feeling pretty raw lately...

2007 - We really loved our new apartment. The old apartment windows faced west and north, so we didn't get any sun until late afternoon. The new one had windows facing south and west, so we had full on sunshine all day long. It was quite a difference let me tell you! I could have lived there happily for several more years were it not for the management.

Our landlord co-owned the building with his sister - the lawyer, and early in the year she forced him out and took sole ownership of the building. She had a low opinion of her tenants (she thought we were all stupid for renting instead of buying houses) and the management had proved themselves to be slumlords. When all this went down, we had four vacant apartments. Normally my phone would be ringing off the hook with people wanting to come look at them but this time it wasn't. I didn't get it. I had cleaned and painted them, except for replacing the carpet in two of the units they were ready to go. At first I thought the management was fielding the calls, but no, that wasn't it. Every day I saw a truck arrive from the company and a woman would enter the building and be there for hours, but I didn't see or hear anyone coming to look at any of the units. One day I saw her going into one of the vacant units and after she left I peaked inside and saw a bunch of cleaning stuff. What the hell? The apartment was already clean, painted and I knew for a fact the carpet had been steam cleaned, so what was she doing in there? This went on for weeks. She'd arrive, enter the same apartment and after several hours she'd leave. Just on a hunch, I entered after she left one day and 'moved' some of her supplies. I hung one of her rubber gloves over the edge of the bucket they were sitting in and placed a can of cleaning spray on the back of the toilet...then I waited for her to come back. When she came and went the next day I peaked in there again and saw everything was just as I had left it. When she showed up again the day after that, I peaked in the window of the apartment she was supposedly cleaning (it was the ground floor and the blinds were open) and saw her stretched out on the floor napping. Nice. I found out (from our old landlord) that she was the daughter of the owner of the management company. Ah nepotism. At this point I decided I didn't care if the vacant units were rented and I started doing the minimum amount of work around the building. Crappy, I know - but if they didn't care, frankly neither did I.

Normally I would have been suffering the winter blahs, but our new place was so sunny I was actually giddy. I received an mp3 player for Christmas and discovered that most of my music library was showing up on it as 'track01' 'track02' 'track03' etc. Not good. So I used my free time sitting at my computer fixing it. I had over 4000 songs on my pc, so this was going to be a chore. I found a program that claimed it could fix it automatically, but it actually made it worse and mislabeled a LOT of songs. Over a thousand of them actually. Yikes! It made a complete mess of my library and to fix it I had to sit there for hours on end wearing head phones and listening to (at least the beginning of) each and every track so I could fix it manually. I should have done that from the get go. While our friends were hanging out visiting, I was sitting there scowling at my computer and listening to the first ten seconds of every song I had. If they ever bring back "Name That Tune" I'll go on it and win big.

The purple haired girls birthday is in February and my friend the Dungeon master wanted to do something special for her. He had made reservations for them at their favorite restaurant and he bought a suit, which he had tailored to fit. I suggested that maybe he should top the night off with a romantic hotel room so they could have some privacy after dinner. He thought it was a good idea and I set about trying to find him a nice room for the night. After much searching around I found him a room near the restaurant that featured a heart shaped hot tub. The lady I spoke to on the phone said it was $250 a night for the romance package and the room came with champagne and strawberries and continental breakfast in the morning. Perfect! Expensive (I think) but perfect! So I told the Dungeon master the details and he went and reserved the room. The big night arrives and I play chauffeur for a little bit so Dungeon master can get a haircut and pick up his room key. The room looked great and I noted I could see our apartment building from the window. So with the preparations made we went back to the house to fetch the Purple haired girl. As soon as she was ready I dropped them off at the restaurant and went home. Later we conducted a test to see if our new flashlight was visible from the hotel and vice versa. It was. Big time. We had a flashlight that goes supernova. I found out the next day though that all had not gone as planned. It turned out that the water in the hot tub would not get hot and the hotel did not deliver on the strawberries or the breakfast, though they did bring up the champagne. The worst was in the morning when construction noise in the building woke them early and they found out the water was shut off. There wasn't even any coffee. And this was supposed to be a romantic room worth $250 a night. There's more but yeah you get the idea. I felt bad and suggested an angry letter and refund was in order. The Purple haired girl agreed and wrote a relatively meek letter listing all the things that weren't right. I took that and sent it to my sweetie's mom who has a legendary poison pen. She revised Purple haired girls letter and sent it back to her. Purple haired girl made few changes to the revision except to correct the timeline and mailed it off to the CEO, the hotel manager, and a few others. In the end, the manager from the hotel called and spent 15 minutes apologizing to the Dungeon master. He also gave them a full refund. Ahhh. The power of an angry letter.

Sometime that spring, my sweetie learned that Steve Vai was coming in concert. He and former roommate #2 were planning to go and he asked me if I wanted to come along. Nope. Don't get me wrong, I love - fucking LOVE - Steve Vai, but I was having some health problems and didn't want him to pony up the dough for a ticket that I might not feel well enough to use. He said 'no worries - if you don't end up going, the Grease Monkey can use the ticket' but I politely declined. I didn't want the guy to get excited about going only to find out that he couldn't because I was going, and since the concert was months in the future we couldn't be sure of his schedule or if I would be up to it. So my sweetie went to Minneapolis and spent two days camped out on the sidewalk in front of the ticket booth at the State Theater. I was afraid he was going to get mugged but he didn't. They wanted front row seats and he got them.

Meanwhile my health problem was worsening. I had endometriosis and it had been getting progressively more painful with each passing year. It was bad enough that I was completely useless when my monthly cycle rolled around. All I could do was lay in bed with a heating pad and wait for it to be over - and by that I mean I was wishing for death. Literally. No amount of pain reliever was helping anymore, I'd just lay there and cry. The treatment for this is usually birth control pills but I was over 30 and a smoker so the doctor wouldn't prescribe them. One day I just couldn't take it anymore and I decided it was finally time for surgery. The only way to end it permanently was a hysterectomy - and it's not like I was planning to have kids anyway, so I called the doctor and set it up. When the date finally arrived (one more agonizing cycle later) my sweetie accompanied me to the hospital. It was going to be Laparoscopic surgery, and since I hate hospitals I asked the doctor if I could go home after it like I did when I had my tubes tied. He said I could, but I wouldn't want to. "Don't be so sure!" I told him and asked him to make sure the nurses knew I could bail when I was done.

I remember sitting in the waiting area, hooked up to an IV and wearing these ridiculously uncomfortable compression stockings trying to chat casually with my mom and my sweetie while I waited for them to fetch me. I'd had surgery before but for some reason this time I was scared. Really scared. But I was putting on a brave front and cracking jokes with them and the nurses. When they finally walked me back to surgery and I hopped up on the table, I jokingly told them to work fast - I wanted to be home in time to watch LOST. They had a good laugh at that, and then they knocked me out.

The next thing I remember was coming to while being wheeled through the hospital on a gurney. It was all over - I was sitting up and barfing my brains out into a bag they had apparently given me as they wheeled me to my room. Through the haze I saw my sweetie looking alarmed and jumping to his feet when we rolled past. They put me in a bed and I immediately passed out again. I spent the next several hours waking up, vomiting and passing out again, and the whole time my sweetie was sitting next to my bed. I couldn't stay awake and I couldn't stay asleep. They had these weird booties on my feet that every 15 minutes or so would start humming loudly and pump full of air like a blood pressure cuff and that would wake me up. Then another wave of nausea would hit me and I'd barf some more and pass out again. I also had a nurse who was coming in every half hour or so to check my blood pressure. Finally the haze was lifting just enough that when the nurse came back in I told her I wanted to leave. She just laughed at me and shook her head "no". "Not yet" she said. She came back with food that I couldn't keep down and told my sweetie he should just go home. "Nothin' doing" he said, "She's pretty firm on wanting to leave and I'm going to be here to drive her when she gets the ok". God I love that man! The next time she came in I told her I needed to use the bathroom. She looked at the side of the bed and nonchalantly informed me I was going to the bathroom. I remember looking at her like she was insane - I had to pee so fucking bad! What was she talking about?! It was then that I discovered the catheter. UGH!!!! What the hell?! No one had said anything about that before hand and I didn't have one when I got my tubes tied - so why now? I snarled at her "Is there any reason I can't go on the toilet?" "They don't want you moving around yet" she replied and then she left again. I looked at my sweetie and said "Please. Get me out of here." He said he'd work on it and then I passed out again.

He woke me up when LOST came on - "Sweetie? LOST is on, you're missing it..." I tried to focus on the TV and managed to stay awake just long enough to see Charlie get an arrow through his neck. "Oh shiiii...." and I was out again. I woke again after the show was over - and now I was thoroughly pissed off. Between the nurse and those stupid booties I wasn't getting any sleep and I was pretty sure that had I been allowed to leave when I wanted to I would have been recovered enough to be awake for my show. I angrily managed to kick one of the booties off and my sweetie helped me out by removing the other one. I still felt like I needed to go to the bathroom. I wanted these fucking tubes out of me and I wanted to go home. NOW. When the nurse came back yet again she wanted to put the booties back on me and I gave her an earful. My sweetie backed me up. She finally decided I could have the catheter removed and allowed me to shuffle into the bathroom and then back to the bed. She wasn't going to ok me leaving though. So my sweetie went to work on her for me, convincing her that I would be more comfortable (and happier) at home. She told him I needed to walk a bit before she could release me, and they got me out of bed and walked me around the halls for a little bit. I did the walking bit quickly enough that it must have convinced her because the next I knew, she was taking out the IV and did an ultra sound on me. Then she reluctantly gave him a bunch of instructions and my bag of clothes and made me sign the release forms. They gave me a few more barf bags for the ride home and wheeled me down to the door to our car.

That poor dude had been sitting next to my bed since 9am that morning and it was now almost midnight and I was barfing into a bag the whole ride home. When we finally got there I crawled up the stairs and immediately flopped onto my bed. AHHHH! Finally! I slept for a solid 12 hours. When I woke up, he filled me in on what I'd missed on LOST (Charlie wasn't really dead), fixed me some soup and helped me take a shower. I was still groggy but finally starting to feel human again. It was well worth it though when the next month came and went without me being in pain, and then another and another. Yeah, I should have done it much sooner. Talking about it later, he said that he personally never wanted to have a catheter - it looked like it was pretty damn uncomfortable. I agreed. It was miserable and it did nothing to alleviate that 'gotta go' feeling whatsoever...

In May the St. Paul Cathedral celebrated its 100th anniversary and they lit it up at night for the occasion. This had all the photographers - amateur and professional - out in droves to take photos of it, and I was there too. I'm not Catholic, but it really is a beautiful Gothic style building. There was so many people that there was no place to park. Fortunately my sweetie had come along and I had him drop me off and circle around while I took as many pictures as I could before he came back. I got a few really nice ones - couldn't have pulled it off without him.

In August, on the day before my sweeties birthday, the I35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed killing 13 people and injuring 145. A far cry from the 9-11 tragedy but it was awful nonetheless. I have friends who live near there and others who drove over that bridge regularly, shit I used to drive over it daily! Watching the news coverage of the wreckage I just hoped and prayed that no one I knew was on it at the time. We were fortunate in that respect, but to this day I still feel horrible for the people who were injured or lost loved ones on it. For a long time we couldn't drive over or under a bridge without cringing. I still can't...

September finally arrived and with it, Steve Vai. My sweetie had been chomping at the bit waiting for that concert date to arrive, and I was regretting not having him get me a ticket. Ah well. I told my sweetie to have fun and that I wanted to hear all about it when he got home. A few hours later he came through the door walking on air and just grinning from ear to ear! "How was it?" I asked. It turned out that Steve had decided to film that concert for a DVD, and my sweetie (and former roommate #2) being in the front row were likely going to be very visible in it. Not only that, but my sweetie got a guitar pick! During "The Crying Machine" Steve had walked up to the edge of the stage, bent down in front of my sweetie and pointed to the neck of his guitar allowing him to grab a pick off of "Flo"! Fucking sweet! Talking about 100mph he gave me the blow by blow of the whole show and we made plans to buy the DVD as soon as it came out. I'm pretty sure it was one of the greatest moments of his life - thanks for that Steve!

In October we did the usual Halloween at the Gamers house and the Purple haired girl joined the cast of characters haunting his yard which was bigger and more elaborate than the year before. By November, we were all tired of the shenanigans with our management company. Since the Dungeon master and the Purple haired girl were planning to get married and start a family, a studio apartment wasn't going to cut it. They decided to start looking for a house to buy, preferably in a nicer neighborhood, and they wanted it to be a duplex so they could bring me and my sweetie with. I helped out by going through all the reality ads to find one in our neighborhood of choice, and found four of them in their price range. They had their realtor set up the showings and we (me, sweetie and the Dungeon master) went off to have a look at them. Since the Purple haired girl had to work, I brought my camera along so she could see them when she got home. The first three that we looked at all had major flaws - weird rooms, no closets, a fire department across the street, current residents who hoped they could stay after the house was sold... but number four was beautiful and completely empty! I took pictures until my batteries went dead and showed them to the Purple haired girl when she got home. We went back for a second look at number four and they decided to make an offer which was accepted.

Now all we had to do was give our notice and move out - and the management company was not happy about that at all! Now instead of four vacancies, they were going to have eight (Punch and Judy had also bailed out) - and there was only eleven units in the building. Apparently the land lady who thought we were 'stupid' for being renters was pissed off that we were not going to be renting from her any longer. We didn't care. We got busy packing our stuff and we were moving out on New Years Eve. You'd think it would be hard to find people to help you move on New Year's but we had a small army of friends to help us move it all. It was quite a production - we emptied three apartments in two truckloads and were done just after midnight. It was exhausting and we all felt like we'd been beat to hell, but we were out of there and our friends were now our landlords. We couldn't have been happier. We were now living in a beautiful house in a decent neighborhood - things were looking up.

Fear of falling

I thought that I knew everything
Till everything changed
Now I'm standing on an island
That is sinking into the sea
And all that I can do
Is just enjoy the scenery

 - The Badlees 

October....right,

In the beginning of the month my sweetie had his follow-up appointment to get his scan results. We knew it wasn't going to be good news... the best we could hope for was no change from the last scan. I knew there'd been a change though - his appetite was diminishing and he was having trouble with his right hand. We were sitting in the exam room chatting when the doctor came in and told us that the cancer had spread further. Well of course it had! It had spread to his organs months before and we were told they weren't going to do chemo that time, so we weren't surprised at all to learn it had spread even more. Why they didn't want to try another course of chemo after the last scan was beyond me - but this time the doctor said we'd try the chemo again. It'd be the same stuff he had the last time, but a much larger dose and because of that he'd probably lose his hair this time. My sweetie complained that the current dose of pain meds was no longer as effective, and he was developing some neuropathy in his right hand - his fingers felt numb - so the doctor raised the dosage of his pain meds. We scheduled the first of his chemotherapy appointments (he would have 3 appointments, one every three weeks) and we left. On the ride home we tried to remain hopeful. Chemotherapy had made him feel much better the first time around and we hoped it'd be beneficial this time too.

A few days later, his cousin called to ask us if we wanted to go for another boat ride before they pulled it out of the water for the year and once again we jumped at the chance. The weather was considerably warmer this time - it was a bright, sunny, beautiful autumn day - a perfect day for a boat ride. The fall colors were peaking and I brought my camera along again and his cousin brought hers as well. She had complimented me before on my picture taking skills, and wanted to know if I had any tips to share. I explained that I had no secrets really - I just take an insane number of photos and get lucky a lot. "People think all my pictures are good because I don't let them see the ones that didn't turn out" I told her. The three of us had a great time together, chatting as we motored up the river, and waving at the other passing boaters who were also out enjoying the warm weather. We beached the boat next to a railroad bridge, set up some folding chairs on the shoreline and did a little recreational smoking. She and I were busily taking pictures of anything and everything, and my sweetie was poking around and digging in the sand with a stick. There was the charred remains of a fire ring - evidence that other people had beached and partied here before us - and my sweetie found a melted piece of glass in it, which he washed in the river and gave to me. I also found the words "I love my sweetie!" written in the sand - a love note he left for me to discover. His cousin spotted it too and snapped a picture of it and of us just as I was giving him a kiss. We hung around there for a while, hoping a train would come by... Unfortunately there wasn't one. A guy with fishing gear had walked out to the middle of the bridge and dropped a line in the water and we came to the conclusion that these tracks were seldom used anymore - either that or this dude was fully prepared to jump in the river if a train came. Then his cousin's cell phone rang, it was her parents reminding her it would be getting dark soon and wanting her to bring the boat back home. It had been a wonderful day, and we hoped we'd be able to do it again sometime.

Back home again, I uploaded the pictures I had taken and sweetie picked a few of them out and asked me to email them to his mom. Inwardly I cringed a little, but I honored his request and forwarded them on to her. I can't fault him for loving his mom, but she had been driving me nuts with her premature mourning.

For the next few weeks he spent a lot of his time napping on the couch with his favorite of our three cats. He also went for a few short rides over to his grandpa's and back on his motorcycle while the weather was still warm. The last time he went for a ride, grandpa had called him over to see another of his cousins while they were in town - this one was a preacher who lives out of state but he wanted to see my sweetie while he was here. He wanted to bring my sweetie "The Good Word"... oh dear... I'm sure my sweetie was polite, he was always polite when dealing with members of the clergy - but he was not a church going guy. In fact, the only times I ever saw him in a church the entire time I knew him was for funerals and weddings. When he came home from that visit, he decided it was time to put the bike in the garage for the winter. He said it was getting too cold for him to ride, and his hand wasn't working well anymore - he was afraid he'd cause an accident. But I think he really just wanted an excuse to not have to visit his out of town cousin again before he left.

Halloween was fast approaching - our favorite holiday. Every year, our friend the Gamer turned his yard into a haunted graveyard complete with tombstones, wandering ghouls and an unearthed coffin (yes a real coffin) that contained our friend the Dungeon Master with a tub of candy and the Purple Haired Girl as his undead widow wailing next to it. We (my sweetie and I) had started out as spectators for this event. I gave the Dungeon Master a ride out there one year and told my sweetie about the elaborate set-up the Gamer had - the year after that my sweetie came along to see it for himself and we practically pissed ourselves laughing at the kids approaching the yard full of teen-aged bravado only to exit screaming in terror. Lol, half the time they ran off so quickly they didn't even get their candy! The year after that, the Gamer was short a crew member and my sweetie stepped up and donned a costume to help out. As for me, I had become the 'official' photographer taking pictures of the yard and costumed crew members. This year the Gamer asked if my sweetie was going to be helping out again and I told him I wasn't sure he was going to be up to it, the weather was getting colder and he'd be getting chemo the week before.

On the 23rd it was finally time for his chemo appointment, and we were once again sitting in the sunny lobby of the cancer center waiting for his name to be called. I remember he was unusually grumpy that morning and snapping at people. They called him back to get his blood work done and he was still grumpy when he returned to the waiting area. We were sitting there waiting for him to be called back into the infusion area and he kept looking at the clock and complaining that they were late. I insisted that 'no, they weren't' and he snapped at me that 'Yes! They were!'. I quietly said to be patient - maybe they were short handed or maybe his new dose took more time to put together - "I'm sure they'll call you in soon" I said. We sat there quietly for a few minutes, holding hands and waiting. I noticed his hand was twitching lightly. Suddenly he very calmly said "Something's wrong"... I looked up form the newspaper I was reading, "What?" I asked looking around the waiting area. "Something's wrong!" he repeated and this time he sounded alarmed. I noticed his hand was now twitching a great deal more, as was his right arm. Then he said it again - "Something's wrong! Help?" Oh shit! "Wait here" I said "I'm getting help". I rushed over to the receptionist and very quickly told her he was having a problem - "I think he's having a seizure" I told her. She immediately got on the phone and within a minute some nurses were rushing out with a wheelchair to fetch him. By this time he was fully convulsing in his chair and yelling "HELP! Somebody...HELP!" They were right next to him and he didn't know they were there. They helped him into the wheelchair and whisked him back to an exam room with him convulsing and hollering the whole way. A moment later it started to subside and his doctor came in to see him. The nurse explained that he'd just had a seizure and the doctor asked him if he'd had a brain scan done. My sweetie said "Not unless you ordered one" and the doctor said he hadn't. Then he said the words I was dreading, that he suspected the cancer had spread to my sweeties brain. Oh...oh fuck. He ordered up another scan immediately. My sweetie asked them where I was and said he wasn't going anywhere without me. "I'm right here" I said. I had been standing next to him the whole time and he didn't know it.

They wheeled him down the hall to the elevator with me in tow and I had kept my composure up to that point, but now waiting for the elevator tears began to fall. I was standing behind them shaking like a leaf, silently crying and wiping my eyes with my sleeve when one of them turned around and saw me. "Oh honey! It's going to be ok!" she said and grabbed me some tissues from behind the counter. I just shook my head numbly and dabbed at my eyes. They took us to the emergency room and by the time they got to the check in desk he was feeling mostly normal again. I listened as they asked him to describe what happened. He told them that it started out as a weird tingle in his right hand which became pain that traveled up his arm, through his neck and then into his brain. His sight cut out and he said he could feel his brain tingling, "It hurt" he said. "I don't ever want to feel that again!" The poor dude had been fully conscious for the whole thing. They put us in a stall to wait for someone to take him for his brain scan and while we were waiting he apologized to me. "I'm sorry sweetie, I know you don't like hospitals" he said. Putting on a brave front I replied that he 'was just trying to jump the line because they were running late'. That made him laugh. "I love my sweetie" he said. "I love you too" I answered. When he went off for his scan I made a few phone calls to let people know what happened and then stepped into the bathroom to have a good cry in private. Then I splashed a little water on my face and went back to the ER stall to wait for him.

The scan showed the cancer had spread to his brain and they admitted him to the hospital and started him on anti-seizure meds. That night he got an MRI and an EKG done and they said he had at least 10 lesions in his brain. His doctor decided to postpone the chemo and scheduled radiation for the lesions. He'd start radiation the next morning and be dosed for the next ten days. They sent me home for the night. I was there bright and early the next morning so I could go down to radiation with him. Just as the orderly was wheeling him out, his mom showed up so I hung back a moment to fill her in on what happened. I was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed telling her and his step-dad what had happened when she suddenly sat down next to me and tried yet again to hug me. I tried to lean away and brush her off me saying "Don't" but she was being very insistent that I 'needed to be hugged' and forcefully trying to pull me toward her. Now I was angry. We'd been over this many times before but she kept pushing it. "GOD FUCKING DAMMIT! QUIT TRYING TO FUCKING HUG ME!" I barked at her feeling instantly embarrassed about my language in front of his step-dad. He was a retired Catholic priest and I've always tried to watch my language when he was around. It had the desired effect though, and it startled her enough that she let go of me immediately. I stood up, apologized to step-dad and told them I was going down to radiation and sweetie should be back in about half an hour and stormed out of the room. I don't know what route the orderly took, but mine must have been a short cut because I got there the same time they did.

I liked the folks down in the radiation center and it was nice to see them again, even if the circumstances were decidedly crappy. So I put on a happy face when they wheeled my sweetie in to get fitted for his mask. This was a form fitted plastic mold to hold his head in place while he got his radiation treatments. With that done, they wheeled him into a radiation room and he got his first treatment. Afterward they were going to call for another orderly to bring him back to his room and I told them not to bother, I could bring him back upstairs. We set a time for the next day and off we went.

His mom and step-dad were still in the room waiting when we got back, and I took a seat and kept my mouth shut while his mom fawned over him. Conversation eventually turned to the price of parking in the hospital ramp. It was ridiculously expensive during the week, but free on the weekends. I had discovered that the hospital offered discounted parking passes for long term patients and mentioned it to them. The passes allowed you to come and go 5 times a day and were a huge discount over the regular rates, not that it mattered much - sweetie and I were flat broke. I wasn't going to let that stop me though. Wild horses couldn't have kept me away from him and I would walk down there if I had to. Soon they were leaving and before they did, his mom slipped me some cash and told me to buy the passes. I was actually grateful to her for that.

Every single day I was there as soon as I was allowed. I'd show up first thing in the morning and we'd just hang out and watch tv until his radiation appointment. Then I'd wheel him down to get zapped, and back up to his room again to watch tv some more. I pushed the lounge chair next to his bed and he piled the pillows on the rail of the bed so we could put our heads together and nap.His sister stopped in to visit, and so did his 'cousin J' who wasn't really a cousin - 'J' was the divorced husband of the cousin with the boat, but the two of them had become fast friends and remained so long after the divorce. J brought him a massive book about guitars -  "The Illustrated Directory of Guitars"... it's so big and heavy he could hardly hold it up. Sweeties mom showed up frequently as well, bringing treats with her. Cookies that were left mostly uneaten, and a case of strawberry soda. He had requested Lime Crush but she'd said she couldn't find it, so I took that opportunity to run to the store and buy him some. Half an hour later I was back with several cans of it for him.

The Dungeon Master and the Purple Haired girl came to visit as well, while they were there we were talking about what we were missing on tv - at home we had the full cable package, but the hospital had limited channels. Sweetie was bummed out about missing Top Gear, and the Purple Haired girl tried unsuccessfully to get an episode on her laptop for him. When we went home, we managed to get some segments of it onto my external drive and the next night we sat around in his hospital room laughing and watching Clarkson, Hammond and May trying their hardest to destroy a Toyota Hilux. It felt like we were all sitting around watching tv at home. The Purple Haired girl sat in the other chair busily crocheting a skull cap for my sweetie for when his hair came out, and the Dungeon Master was lounging on the floor like a cat. I also managed to get the recently aired segment about them on 60 minutes since Purple Haired girl hadn't seen it yet. In that segment, James May was wearing a t-shirt that said 'Keep Calm and Carry On'. When we saw it during its original airing, my sweetie and I were curious about it so I googled it. Keep Calm and Carry On was one of a series of posters intended to raise the morale of the British public in the event of an invasion during world war 2. We'd considered it to be appropriate for our situation and adopted the slogan ourselves - we were being invaded by cancer after all - and we ordered up some t-shirts of our own. All things considered, it was probably the most pleasant evening we've ever spent in a hospital. I do humbly apologize to the BBC for our act of piracy. I hope that they (and the guys at Top Gear) will forgive me. It was for a good cause.

While he was in the hospital I kept busy taking care of him. He was a bit wobbly on his feet at this point so I helped him out of bed and to the bathroom, I helped him shower, I fetched him cups of ice for his soda and wheeled him to and from his radiation treatments. The nurses said they hardly knew he was there since he never had to hit the call button when I was around. They really only had to come in to give him his meds, which had increased from just pain medications and now included an anti seizure med, a steroid, an anti nausea and an anti depressant. These were all working well, as was his radiation. He seemed to be feeling better and they were planning to release him soon.

A few days before he was released from the hospital, he had another visitor - this time it was the hospital Chaplain. Being more or less agnostic, I try to be respectful of the clergy but I couldn't help but feel my hackles raise at this visit. Hospital chaplains usually visit those on their last legs and my sweetie was feeling better - his appetite had even improved. So I felt like the buzzards were circling prematurely and wondered if his mom was behind this visit. Even so, I kept my mouth shut and sat there doodling little pictures on my sketch pad while they chatted. The guy avoided the subject of religion though, and they chatted about my sweeties circumstances; how he'd been a pretty hard core alcoholic for many years and gave it up only to get diagnosed with cancer a few years later. He asked if that was upsetting to my sweetie and I'll never forget his answer. My sweetie told him "No, if I hadn't quit when I did I would certainly have died some other way a long time ago and my sweetie was worth it. Quite frankly I feel like these last several years have been the bonus round for me." Wow. I almost burst into tears again. Chaplain guy seemed impressed by his answer. He tentatively broached the subject of religion and my sweetie sidestepped it saying quite frankly he didn't know and wouldn't know until if or when he got there. Chaplain guy nodded and dropped the subject. He wasn't being pushy and I respected him for that. Around that time a nurse popped in and asked us to step out for a moment while she gave my sweetie an injection of something, and outside the Chaplain asked me the same question. My reply was much the same as my sweeties - I won't know until I'm dead, and until then I just try to be nice. The nurse left and we went back in, the Chaplain said it was nice talking to us and that he'd like to stop by again. My sweetie told him 'Sure' and then he left.

Sweetie was still in the hospital on Halloween, and I didn't want him to miss out on the Gamers house that year - he had expanded the into the backyard and the garage - and it was the biggest and most elaborate set up to date. I reluctantly cut my visit short to go over there and take pictures and video of all of it so my sweetie could see it. I was on my way back to the hospital to show them to him when my car broke down. Just a few miles from home. As if the universe itself was out to get me. I couldn't get the car to start, so I tried to get a cab. While I was waiting for the cab, some homeless dude decided he was going to wait with me 'so no one would mess with me'. I have nothing against the homeless, I've always had a sort of 'there but for the grace of God go I' attitude about them, but this guy was starting to freak me out and I was starting to wonder if I was going to get robbed. Then he asked me if I had any money to spare. I didn't have any cash on me, I was going to have to get the cash to pay the cab when I got home. All I could offer homeless dude was a candy bar. He decided to stick around anyway. So I waited, and waited, and waited some more, while cab after cab just shot right past me like I wasn't even there. Of course they did - every time one came by, this crazy dude would go running out in the street yelling at them and flailing his arms. After about an hour of that, I decided this guy was hurting more than helping and I went to the 24 hour diner a block away and asked them if they would call a cab for me and could I wait for it inside please. They made the call and I waited another hour - still no cab. They called again and I continued waiting. 45 minutes later and I was nearly in tears. Fortunately for me the waitress was kindhearted and her husband was there. She asked how far away I lived and had him give me a lift home. I was so grateful! I feel quite certain that if he had not given me a ride I'd still be down there waiting to this very day.

And that wasn't the end of it, oh no...not by a long shot. I was home but I still had to get my car home too. I have emergency road service in my insurance policy, but they require you to pay the tow truck up front and then they'll reimburse you with a check later. I only had five bucks cash at home. Fortunately, the Purple Haired girl was home by then and came to see me. I was on the phone tearfully explaining my predicament to my sweetie and trying to figure out what I was going to do when she offered to use her credit card to pay for a tow truck for me, then she gave me a ride down to the car to wait for him. The homeless guy was still there and came over and knocked on the window. Seriously dude?! So I gave him the $5 and he disappeared. We had to wait nearly an hour for the tow truck to come, and another half hour for him to lift my car and scribble on a clipboard before we were finally underway. It took less time to get to the house than it did for him to do the paperwork. By the time it was all over, it was nearly 3am and it was one of the longest days of my life.

The day they released my sweetie he called home and said I could stay put, his mom had shown up and was going to give him a ride home since the car was misbehaving. I had my misgivings about this, but I said ok. His mom drives a vehicle that's really too much for her to handle (in both mine and my sweeties opinion) and didn't seem to grasp the idea that hitting bumps in the road or bouncing off the curbs while parking jostled her son painfully. On top of that, apparently there was a bunch of paperwork that needed to be signed before he could leave... I was expecting him home by 1pm and for some reason he didn't get out of there until nearly 6 - by which time he was in a completely foul mood. *sigh* I knew I should have gone in... if I had been there that shit wouldn't have flown at all. I'd have had no problem telling them we were leaving within the hour whether they produced the paperwork or not. Just try and stop me. His mom was apparently content to stand around waiting though. When he finally got home all he wanted to do was take his meds and go to bed. I let him.

And that, my friends, was October.

B-movie Boxcar Blues

I'm back... As you might imagine the holidays this year were pretty hard and depressing for me, but I'm not done yet - so let's get the show back on the road.

2006:

Early in the year, my sweeties sister had stopped over for a visit and I was annoyed. She was expecting her first child and was chattering on about how excited she was. Sweetie and I were decidedly less excited about it than she was. He was outwardly polite but of the opinion that she was only wanting a kid because several of her friends had kids and she was feeling left out. I was irritated by the whole situation for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on at the time. Years later I finally figured out why I was bothered. The whole time I had known her, she was married to a guy who was adamant about not wanting to raise a family. And all that time she claimed to be on board with that, saying she didn't want kids herself. Apparently she lied about that though, and had started pressuring her husband in the hopes he would change his mind. When he didn't, their marriage began to crumble and she began seeing a different guy on the side - one who was willing to oblige her. So here she was, still married to her husband and several months pregnant by another dude. At the time they were separated but still living together, her husband knew the kid wasn't his but they hadn't filed for divorce yet because he was having medical issues and he was on her health insurance policy. According to her she still 'cared' about him and didn't want to screw him over by cutting off his health insurance. I figured out much later that I was bothered by it because I was sympathetic to her husband. Like him, I had always been adamant about not wanting to have kids of my own - and like him I had also found myself being dumped when I refused to change my mind about it. I felt bad for the guy. He'd been upfront with her from the get go that he wasn't into the kid thing, and she claimed to be of the same mindset and married him anyway. Inwardly I was worried. I had also been upfront about the subject with my sweetie... what if he was just paying me lip service as well? Was I going to get dumped again? Shit. I can not tell you how much anxiety that caused me. After she left, he reassured me that he wasn't going to ditch me because I didn't want kids, but I was still offended on behalf of my brother-in-law. I thought he was a good guy and he didn't deserve this. Fortunately she didn't visit our house very often so I was able to distance myself a bit.

It had been an unseasonably warm winter, and one 'nice' day in February I decided I wanted to go take some pictures of the Rockman statues by Tom Otterness in front of the Minneapolis courthouse. I had been there with my mom the previous fall when she had to file bankruptcy and thought the statues were pretty cool. I told my sweetie I was going to park out at the Mall of America and take the light rail downtown to take some pictures of them. My sweetie decided to come with, he was never one to pass up a chance to ride a train - any train, any distance. And I was always glad to have the company. We had a good time. It felt like a bit of an adventure and when the train picked up speed in the airport tunnel it was thrilling! The courthouse was only a block away from the train stop and I buzzed from one statue to the next taking pictures of all of them. When I was satisfied that I had taken enough pictures we hopped back on the train and returned to MoA to get something to eat before heading home to upload them to my computer.

My timing on that trip couldn't have been better. In March, we got hit with a massive snowstorm - the type they refer to as a widow maker. Around here that means the snow is so wet and heavy that people can die of a heart attack trying to shovel the sidewalks. And that's exactly what happened. The day after the snow storm, the owner of our apartment building knocked on the door and told me that my boss - the guy who ran our management company - had been found dead of a heart attack on the sidewalk in front of his house.  I had worked for him for years and I was saddened by this news. My sweetie had worked for him too, and said that's how he was probably going to go out himself - shoveling snow after a blizzard. Since he was basically a one man show, the management company no longer existed and we would be getting a different one to handle the property. The landlord to me not to worry, I would still be the building caretaker and things wouldn't change much. Since he co-owned this building with his sister, she decided that we were now going to be managed by the company that took care of her other buildings. The landlord didn't much like this particular company, but she left him little choice. It was going to be her way or the highway.

It didn't take me long to figure out that I didn't care for the new management either. They were completely up their own ass with regulations and mandatory meetings about tenant rights. The old boss was decidedly more casual about his operation. I had never had to attend any meetings while he was in charge and if we ever had a problem in our building it was quickly solved with one phone call to him. But not any more... The first meeting I had to attend was an orientation for all of us who had been managed by the old company. The new company was so afraid of their tenants suing them for discrimination that they had reams of paperwork to discuss what we could and couldn't do. All I can say is it went on entirely too long and when it was over I, and the other caretakers, couldn't get out of there fast enough.

I discovered early on that if there was a problem, they weren't going to do anything if they could help it. I was informed by the Dungeon Master and the Purple haired girl one evening that the tenants in the apartment next to his were always fighting loudly. This was upsetting to the Purple haired girl, she'd been a victim of domestic violence in the past. I asked them to let me know if it happened again since I couldn't hear any of it from my apartment downstairs and I informed the management company of the situation. Their response was pretty apathetic, and they told me to call the police if I thought the woman was in danger. Ok then... So that's what I did. The next time I was informed they were fighting, I called the cops. The cops took half an hour to come over and by then the fight was over. The woman insisted that everything was just fine thank you and refused to say anything against her abusive boyfriend. The cops left without doing a thing. Ugh. As time wore on, these two would become a major thorn in my side and the new management refused to do anything.

My sweeties sister has a lot of tattoos. She had become friends with the artist who did my sweeties armband a few years earlier and as a result she had acquired a lot of really nice ink. One day in April she called my sweetie and told him the artist had an apprentice at her shop who needed to do some work to fill out his hours for his apprenticeship. Since she was pregnant she couldn't help out but she thought her brother might be willing. He was. She said she'd foot the bill for it, and we drove over to Minneapolis to discuss what he wanted to get done and set up the appointment. After thinking about it a bit, my sweetie decided to get a Walleye skeleton on his forearm. He had an old tat recolored. He also got two cuffs made of musical symbols - a G clef, F clef, natural, rest. I was jealous and told him so - I had a bunch of youthful stupidity on my bicep that I was wanting to vanish. "No fair! You're getting all this new ink and I've been waiting forever to get the cash together just to get my cover up done" I said. He nodded sympathetically and said he'd give up some of his chair time so I could get mine done too. Me: "Really?" Him: "Yes." Me: "Sweet!! Thank you sweetie!" Him: *grinning* "I love my sweetie!" When we went in for his next appointment, he told the apprentice our plan and the guy said 'Sure, no problem!' The next appointment was mine and I had him cover up the stuff on my bicep with a customized Celtic knot work Yin Yang symbol I had commissioned from the Dungeon Master years earlier. I also had an old tat recolored as well. I was grateful to my sweetie for giving up some of his ink so I could have some too and I couldn't have been happier with them. Sweeties sister got into a bit of a twist over it though. She was willing to foot the bill for his ink, but was not happy about paying for mine even though he told her he had given up some of his chair time so I could have some. The way he saw it, the bill was going to be the same whether it was him getting inked or me. That was the end of that though - she put the kabosh on it and there weren't any more appointments after that. D'oh! Sorry sweetie...but thank you! I love my tats!

In May the Purple haired girl began having a problem with her mailbox. The door was warped somehow and impossible to close. In the course of trying to repair it for her, I opened the box right next to hers and was nearly knocked over by the explosion of mail that flew out of it. For some reason the guy in apartment 1 hadn't been collecting his mail and the postman just kept stuffing the box instead of saying something about it. His car was in the lot but I knew he'd had a heart problem and thought maybe he was in the hospital again. I gathered it all up and figured I'd put it in his apartment for him. I grabbed the key for his place, knocked loudly on the door, opened it a crack and announced myself - "Management!" I didn't get an answer so I swung the door open and entered, planning to leave the mail on his table. The tenant was laying face down on the floor and I knew as soon as I saw him that he was dead. Oh shit. I set the mail on the floor and quickly left the apartment to call the police. I asked the people in the apartment next to him when they'd seen him last, and could use their phone. They said it had been a few days... I called 911 and told them I had just discovered one of our tenants dead in his apartment. 911 operator says "Are you sure he's dead?" I said "Oh yeah...I'm pretty sure he's dead." 911 asks "How do you know?" I said "His eyes are cloudy and his hands and feet are black, also he's not breathing." With that, the neighbors immediately ran to the apartment next door to gawk at him. Really you guys?! Are you fucking kidding me?! 911 said they'd send a paramedic. I said they needed to send a coroner. Then I hung up and shooed the neighbors out of his apartment, locked the door and went to sit on the front step and wait for the paramedics to arrive. They got there with some cops in tow and while they were hauling in bags of equipment I told them they weren't going to need any of it. They took one look at him and agreed. I had to answer a bunch of questions for the cops who told me I had done the right thing by checking the apartment when I discovered the mail situation. The new management disagreed and told me I had violated that tenants right to privacy by entering his apartment the way I did. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!! You have GOT to be kidding me! I guess I was supposed to have let the guy lay there until he started to smell before notifying anyone. I was pretty creeped out. He'd been gone for a few days at least and after they took him out you could still see the imprint of him in the carpet.
Fortunately, the landlord was sympathetic. He said he'd have handled it the same way and we had a good laugh talking about the idiots at the management company.

Life goes on. Sweetie was having trouble with his old motorcycle - something was always breaking on it, shit he couldn't fix, and it had been in and out of the shop. His mom decided that in honor of his continued sobriety, he should have something more reliable. She offered to buy him a new (used) bike and they found a nice Harley in her price range. And man, he rode the shit out of that bike! Suddenly he was jumping at any chance to go for a ride - if I needed something from the store, "I'll get it!" and he was gone in a flash. Lol, even if it was tampons! He didn't care, he just wanted an excuse to ride somewhere. His friend the Greasemonkey acquired an old chopper with plans to get it running and ride with my sweetie...

Around this time, sweeties sister had her baby. I expressed disinterest and my sweetie was happy for the excuse to ride his motorcycle over to her house to see him. She was still married to her husband but had moved in with the new guy. Meanwhile on the home front, the feuding couple (who I'm going to call Punch and Judy) were at it again. This time they had a screaming match that I could actually hear down in my place. Then I saw Judy go out to the parking lot and get in a car that arrived during the fight. At first I thought she was finally leaving him and had called for a ride - but no. They sat in the car for a few minutes and then her head disappeared into the guys lap. Eww. Really? Five minutes later she was trotting back upstairs and they were yelling at each other again. So I put in another call to the cops. This time when they arrived I told them about the fight, her visit to the car in the lot and that she was unlikely to say anything was wrong when they went upstairs. I told them the only reason I called them was to generate a paper trail so management could evict them. They were always noisy, slamming doors and fighting - and Judy was in the habit of going to the grocery store, hauling the shopping carts all the way home and abandoning them in the backyard of the building. This had happened three or four times before I caught her in the act. When I asked her to stop she got pissy with me and told me to mind my own business. Since keeping the building and the yard clean was my job, I figured it was in fact my business. All I could do was call the store to fetch their carts and report the shenanigans to management (who refused to do anything).

My one moment of triumph that month came when the Freak Show's dog managed to get out of his yard (chicken wire is ineffective at containing a pit bull - who knew?) and came down into our yard again. Me and my sweetie were sitting in the house watching TV when we suddenly heard a commotion outside followed by the sound of the dog squealing and yelping in pain. We ran to the window just in time to see our resident groundhog attacking the dog and practically pissed ourselves laughing. (The groundhog had made a burrow in our yard a few years earlier and the nice old man across the hall from me was always feeding her. She'd had several litters of babies there, and was so used to the old man that he was able to hand feed her.) The dog had tried to attack her and she fought back. Freak Show ran out of his house, saw the dog in our yard and noticed it was bleeding pretty good when he hopped the fence to get it. He was pissed off and demanding to know what happened to his dog. We explained that the dog had escaped his yard and gotten into a fight with our groundhog, and the groundhog won. Now he was really pissed and wanting to know where the groundhog was - threatening to kill it. We told him that was a bad idea and convinced him that groundhogs are protected (no, they're not really) and he'd face jail time if he hurt it. We must have been convincing because he decided against it and fixed the fence instead.

Around June, my sweeties friend the Greasemonkey came over one day and told my sweetie that the transportation museum was going to be running one of their old steam trains through town the next day on an excursion. Sweetie was so excited you'd have thought he was five years old and the next day was Christmas. We worked fast trying to find out which track it was going to be on and where we should be so we could see it when it went by. I grabbed my camera and we hopped in the Greasemonkey's van to go scout our location. We were looking for a place where we could have a good view and checked a few locations and I took test pictures. One spot was a park by the river that was right next to the tracks. It started to get dark out while we were there and I went back to the van to wait while the fellas weighed our options. I was sitting in the van reviewing pictures and waiting for them when a squad pulled up and two cops got out and asked me what I was doing there. I told them I was waiting for my sweetie and his friend to come back, and that we were looking for a place to watch the 261 come through the next day. They wanted to know what that was and I explained that it was an old steam train and that I intended to take pictures of it. They looked at me like I had spiders coming out of my ears. "Why would you want to take pictures of a train?" they asked. "It's an antique steam engine! It's gonna be puffing smoke and they just look cool!" I replied. "Why wouldn't I want to take pictures of it?" They looked confused. "Okaaay...well the park is closed for the night - you have to leave." "Yep. I see them coming back now, we'll be going." The cops asked and got the same story from them so we were allowed to get back in the van and leave. The next morning me, my sweetie and the Dungeon Master raced to the location we decided to watch from. Sweetie was grumpy and certain we were late and there was a fair amount of squabbling between us as I fractured some traffic laws getting us there. We arrived and waited...and waited... Now I was starting to get grumpy. I'm not a morning person and if we missed it I was never gonna hear the end of it. Then suddenly I saw a puff of smoke over the trees in the distance. "I think it's coming" I said. Sweetie looked where I was pointing and agreed. We got our cameras ready - and there it was! It was moving pretty fast for a steam train and it was wicked cool with its big plume of smoke trailing behind. I snapped as many pictures as I could of the engine, and we waved at all the passengers who were smiling and waving back at us. And then it was gone. Time to race back home and upload the pictures! They were some of the coolest photos I've ever taken, I had the best one blown up to poster size and framed. It's still hanging on my wall right now.

That summer I also planned my first large planter garden. I pitched the idea to my sweetie and he thought it was a cool idea. I found the logs we used to build it at a free trade site online and with the help of the Greasemonkey, me and my sweetie went to fetch them. We arrived at the house getting rid of them and discovered that they were currently being a retaining wall - we'd have to disassemble it to get the logs we wanted. It was back breaking work but we somehow pulled it off and loaded Greasemonkey's van full. Back at home though, all I had to do was stand and point. I felt guilty about that, but they assured me that they could handle it. Once it was assembled, we brought in a truckload of dirt and filled it. When it was done it looked like it had been professionally built.

July we made our annual pilgrimage to Harriet Island for the Taste of Minnesota to see the bands play. Alice Cooper came that year and later that month Ribfest had Ted Nugent. Alas, I missed Uncle Ted - It was so hot outside I couldn't function, so I told my sweetie to go without me. He also saw Robin Trower at the Fitzgerald and waited in line to get an autograph after the show. Trower was one of the artists on my sweeties 'must see' list. He never missed a Trower show. We went to Pine city to visit our friends, have some barbeque and sit around the bonfire. We also went to my dad's place in Moose Lake and had fun driving around on his atv's. When we got back home, the Dungeon Master went upstairs to his apartment and then came right back down to inform me that it looked like someone had tried to break into Punch and Judy's place. I went upstairs and looked - it appeared that someone had tried to rip the door off it's hinges. The molding was hanging off and there was a bag of random crap sitting on the floor next to the door. I went outside to see if either of them were around and discovered our tall ladder was leaning up against the building at their window. While I was looking at that, Judy arrived home and I discovered that she had been locked out of her apartment. Apparently she went to the store or something and didn't take her keys. While she was gone, Punch took off and locked the place up. Instead of waiting for him to come back or calling management to send someone to unlock it, she decided to try and bust her own door down. When that failed she tried to break in through her window (hence the ladder). *sigh* The landlord was annoyed and management didn't care.

August was my sweeties birthday and for the first time I decided not to go with to his mom's house for his birthday party. It was just too hot and she always invited too many people. They always wanted to chat me up and I just wanted to be left alone. I didn't feel like socializing with his mom's friends and I didn't want to be rude to them, so I just didn't go. Later in the month I was over to her house by myself - I don't remember why I was there - but I remember that when I was helping her haul her trash can out she made some offhand comment about how it must be hard to put up with my sweetie since he wasn't very physically affectionate (or something along those lines). Wait, what?! What the hell is she talking about?! I assured her that not only was he affectionate but I was very happy with him. I was creeped out though - it sounded like she was implying something. I did not want to be talking to his mom about my sex life, and quite frankly it was none of her business if I was getting laid regularly or not. Why would she even bring it up? After that my attitude toward her began to sour.

September the four of us (me, sweetie, Dungeon Master and Purple haired girl) went to the Renaissance festival, and the Dungeon Master proposed to the Purple haired girl. She said yes.
Meanwhile back at home, Punch and Judy were still up to their usual shit and I figured out a way to make their lives miserable for a change. I noticed the tags on Punch's van had expired (it also wasn't running) and when I called management to tell them about the latest disturbances they caused I let that little fact slip. Without missing a beat, the new boss told me to have it towed. I couldn't believe it. After all the crap they had been pulling, it's expired tags that finally gets a response?! Wow. Whatever...I called the tow company and vanished his van on him. Finally some payback. The dirtbag was always trying to intimidate me when I had to deal with him, but unlike his old lady I wasn't scared of him and that really pissed him off. When the van disappeared he sent Judy down to ask me why it was towed. I told her it was towed because all the vehicles in the lot had to be running, insured and the tags current - his had been broke down for several months, and it had expired tags on out of state plates. She said ok and left. Five minutes later she's back and he's with her. He's holding a running tape recorder in his hand and immediately starts berating me about towing his van and how he's going to get me fired. I calmly (yes really) told him his vehicle was violating the lots rules and that management told me to tow it. If he had a problem he should call them. He hollered about how he was going to go to Wisconsin to get new tags next week and I had no right, etc.. I pointed out that since he lives in Minnesota he was breaking the rules by keeping his van registered in Wisconsin (he was doing it because Wisconsin doesn't require insurance - Minnesota does) to try and get around the lots 'must be insured' rule. So I had it towed. Then he got all excited thinking he had somehow caught me admitting to doing something wrong on tape and said I was going to get fired. I told him all he had on tape was me admitting that I had done what my boss told me to do, so good luck with that - and shut the door in his face. Hearing him have a hissy fit in the hall after that made it all worth it. Hey, normally I'm reasonable but this jackass and his old lady had pushed me to the edge a long time ago. Call me a bitch - I don't care.

A short time after that, the guy in the apartment across the hall from them moved out and I asked the landlord if I could move to that unit. I pointed out that I had been living in my current apartment for 12 years and it was needing repairs that would be easier to accomplish if it was vacant. I suggested that Punch and Judy might be better behaved if they had the caretaker living across the hall as well. The landlord agreed and gave it the thumbs up.

It took less than two hours for my sweetie and the Greasemonkey to move our stuff up to the new apartment. Punch and Judy noticed right away and their distress was audible across the hall. We were there less than a day and I could hear them planning to move out of the building.
Me and my sweetie squabbled briefly over how to arrange the furniture in the new place - in the end I went with his suggestion and felt stupid for arguing about it in the first place. The new place was awesome - we had a perfect view of the downtown skyline and tons more sunlight than the old place. It was the same size as the old one but it somehow felt bigger. Since we were now on the top floor it also felt less like we were living in a fishbowl, and there was no need for the pervert shield anymore. No one could see into our place without a high powered telescope.

The Dungeon Master ran a D&D campaign with his buddy the Gamer every weekend and the Purple haired girl had joined the campaign. Late one evening in November just as I was getting ready to crash, there was a panicked knock on my door. I opened it and there was the Dungeon Master looking freaked out and telling me the building was on fire. What?! I immediately called the fire department with one hand and started shaking my sweetie awake with the other. He heard me saying fire and was out of bed and dressed in seconds. It turned out the fire was in the Purple haired girls apartment on the first floor. The stoves in the building were from the 1970's and had push buttons instead of dials and her very rambunctious kitties had managed to kick a burner on while hopping on or off the counter. This caught a dish cloth on fire which then caught the microwave on fire which...well you get the idea. With the fire department on the way I raced around the building waking up anyone who was home and getting them outside. My sweetie and the Dungeon Master raced down to the Purple haired girls apartment and ran inside to rescue her kitties. While they were in there my sweetie discovered the hot burner and turned it off. There was no flame happening, it was all just smoldering and producing acrid black smoke. When the fire department got there all they needed to do was make sure nothing else was burning and they set up some giant fans to pump the smoke out. Her apartment was completely trashed. Fortunately, the apartment next to mine and right across the hall from the Dungeon Master had recently been vacated, so the landlord moved her up there. Now that all of us were living on the same floor together it was a lot less running up and down the stairs - that was a bonus.

When December rolled around, Punch and Judy had another knock down drag out fight. They waited until we weren't home to do it, and we returned to find random shit all over the stairwells. A bunch of clothes and personal items...and their cat. It looked like someone had just grabbed armfuls of stuff and flung it over the railing. I took a bunch of pictures to document it and once again called management about them. As usual, management didn't do a damned thing.

I don't know exactly when I noticed it, but during this year my sweetie started losing a lot of weight. He was already a skinny guy, so this wasn't a good thing. He didn't have any extra weight to spare. He was also spending a lot more time in the bathroom all of a sudden. At first I worried that he had fallen off the wagon and was keeping booze stashed in there, but one day while he was out on a bike ride I went over the house with a fine tooth comb and came up empty. I was starting to worry and suggested he get a check up with a doctor. He said he was fine and suggested that I was the one who should see a doctor since I was always getting the hiccups and that 'wasn't normal'. So I let it go. By December though, he was starting to have trouble catching his breath when he'd climb the stairs. We figured it was just that he wasn't used to the two extra flights he had to climb now. His mom had also noticed this shortness of breath and finally talked him into going to see her pulmonologist, Doctor Fail. Doctor Fail said it was probably asthma and prescribed an inhaler - the first of several misdiagnoses she'd give.

Despite all of this, we thought life was good. We were happy, our friends were near and we loved our new apartment.