Jaci Dawn

Today was harder than it should have been. 2020, right? It’s not like we haven’t been blessed this year: no immediate family members have passed or even contracted COVID. WE have not contracted COVID. I know too many who have contracted it, lost family or friends, and/or have long term health issues due to having contracted it. But today was still harder than it should have been.

I got to sleep in today. Last night was my night to get up with the puppy and take him outside for his potty/poopy run. I put him back in his kennel and let my husband get up with him ninety minutes later. In the puppy’s defense, he is now sleeping 7-8 hours straight at night. He’s still getting up on Idaho time to eat hs first meal of the day. Tomorrow is my morning to get up with him.

Oh – we named him “Ruger” (ROO-grr) after the weapons manufacturer. He *is* a gun dog and while the name doesn’t fit him as a puppy, it will fit him as an adult dog. We call him a lot of other names like “Roscoe” and “Poop-head”, too. He is currently chewing on one of my walking sticks and growling at it.

Today. I had plans to pay bills, write cards, and pick up a table top Christmas tree. That’s not hard. Well, the cards are hard: sympathy cards are always hard and I have a few to write and send. Deaths during the Holiday season are especially hard. I also have some encouragement cards to send and those can be difficult, too – I don’t want to write some stupid platitude about how things will get better (they will) because I know how dark that tunnel can be (and how you just know that when a light comes on at the end of it, it’s a freight train headed your way, not the end of the tunnel). I’ve had some hard Christmas seasons and some hard years. Platitudes are nice and mean well, but they rarely connect and I want to connect with those hurting. Let them know I get it.

To the point: I wasted an hour on email and coffee (is it ever a waste of time drinking that first cuppa without interruption? I really think not but I suppose some people do). Then I got an ocular migraine. I rarely get the headache that follows, but the ocular migraine in and of itself is miserable, I lose vision in both eyes and it often lasts 45-75 minutes. I can function but I can’t drive, write, or do math. You can research the condition but don’t believe what WebMD says about it. It happens frequently and it affects both eyes although I suspect the impairment is really just in one eye. Mine usually last at least 45 minutes. I have suffered them for over 40 years. There’s no cure.

I digress. I used the time to pick up around the house and take Ruger outside for a brisk (east wind!) exercise. I waited until I could see again.

And then I got the headache. Well, crud. I just gave up on writing cards and paying first of the month bills. I could at least see to drive so I bundled up and headed to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and a few items I forgot the last time I went grocery shopping. I try to keep trips to the outside to a minimum. I have cute masks to wear but I have to admit this whole mask wearing and hand washing after every stop is getting old.

I tried – again – to settle down and pay bills. I just signed up up for another year of health insurance under the ACA. Our premium jumped $90 for the same plan. There are cheaper plans but if we want to keep our doctor (we do) then the only plan that works is the one we’ve been on. Also, the cheaper plans are mostly Kaiser Permanente and Kaiser is only good in our neck of the woods. We travel. We need insurance that works outside of our area. I hate the ACA as health insurance has only gotten more expensive and deductibles have only gotten higher. Next November I am eligible for medicare and that brings its own list of issues. The entire system is rigged to benefit insurance companies. AND – to top it off – it took me a full half hour to figure out how to pay that new increased premium just so we could activate the damn insurance.

It should have been simple. I’m tech savvy. The websites are not.

I moved on to paying the other bills. I like to pay some bills manually rather than have them automatically deducted. I can see the numbers and budget. Some credit bills I like to add a certain amount over the minimum payments, but not always (like December, when I want to save extra money for purchasing gifts). That all should have been simple but Northwest Natural changed their website (again) and I had to navigate those changes. I’ll have to resave the link as the old link is no longer valid. WHY?!

Did I mention Christmas trees? I know I did. After I picked up my meds, I drove down to see if the tree lot we sometimes buy from was even open. NOPE. Great, thanks, COVID. I checked the local community Facebook page for links to tree lots open. NONE. There are Christmas tree farms, most by appointment only, and very few that offer table top sized Noble firs.

I searched Amazon for unlit fake ones and found two under $40 that could possibly work. Then I hit my husband up. Would he be willing to have a fake tree for one year and just resell the thing next year (or give it away)? My level of anxiety vs. Christmas tree hunting as up for debate.

So, yeah. I bought my first ever fake tree. We had one (briefly) when I was a kid and all of us hated it except Dad (who had to go pick a real one in a state where real ones were sold at a premium). Dad bowed to the majority when we moved to an area where he could just cut one in the woods. So his first cut tree was a piss-fir (white pine) that smelled like cat you-know-what and satisfied the rest of us that he was truly back on track for real trees. Funny how you can justify the smell of a certain real tree over a fake tree.

I bought a fake tree. Let that sink in. It’s three feet tall (less than a meter) and will sit on the kitchen table. Ruger is too young, too rambunctious, and still teething. I don’t need a tree on the floor and my ornaments don’t deserve Ruger. I’ll use half our ornaments and create a themed tree (birds). The tree arrives sometime next week.

THEN I decided to order Christmas gifts online (there are only a few that need to be ordered online this year). Yay, COVID. The gifts I ordered for the Alaska grands will arrive between now and December 24. I’m glad i didn’t wait a day to order! Ordering for my mother-in-law should have been simple, but no… NO. An hour later I finished her order on Shutterfly and argued with the system abut where to send the gift. And argued with the system on the price. I had to back out completely, go back in, and order. WHY IS THIS SO HARD!?

I’m done. I still have cards to write. Bills are paid, orders are finished, and my husband’s pants arrived from Carhartt. His pants are wrong. I want to curl up in a ball and hibernate. I am exhausted. Today should not have been this hard. It is 10:30PM.

Here’s a picture of Ruger to make this post worth reading: