It's Been a Rough Year to Say the Least

2017 is a year that will go down in Andyland history as the most severe with it's cosmic kicks in the ass. The culmination of which has been this June, my birthday month. It's hard to even wrap my head around all that has been happening. I usually hate talking about my personal everyday life on my blog, but it's too much for one head to contain. I had hoped this year would be filled with loads more writing in my blog, but right from the start it's been telling me to go fuck myself.

At the end of last year, I got news that my mother had stage 4 cancer. She'd have to undergo a lot of treatments, but they were hopeful. I took a trip to NY to visit my family back in February. It was one of those trips where everyone was spilling their guts more than usual because they didn't know if there would be a next time for anything to be said.

When I got back to California a few weeks pass before I get the news that my dad has cancer as well, but a much much more severe case. They do not expect him to make a recovery and put my family in contact with hospice care services to help ease his end of life care.

My ladyfriend and I also being forced to move from my apartment due to it being uninhabitable in it's current condition. Belmont Brokerage, the rental management company, informed my ladyfriend and I that they need to fumigate back in May due to the roach infestation that was brought in by the other tenants who leave their front doors open most of the day. However Belmont Brokerage failed to inform us (even after living there for 6 years) that they don't have a key to get into our apartment. At no point did they ever contact us to let us know this and I don't understand how we as the occupants were supposed to know they didn't have a key to access our apartment. So after preparing for fumigation and then slowly starting to put things back to a livable situation, we find out from the Holland's Red Alert Pest Control that Belmont Brokerage didn't give them a key to our unit so it hadn't been treated. They said they would need one of us to be there to let them in to do the treatment, wait around for them to do the treatment, then lock up and go away for 4-6 hours until the apartment was safe to enter again.

Naturally this would have been after we prepared for the fumigation again; which would mean removing everything from every closet, cabinet, and drawer, then covering it all so it won't get the chemicals all over it when they did the treatment. We decided right then that we needed to move out of the apartment. Belmont Brokerage made it abundantly clear that they do not value our tenancy. When we went to turn in our notice letting them know we would be gone on July 1st, they refused to accent our notice to vacate. They stated we would be responsible for the cost of rent 30 days from when they accepted the notice.

Fortunately in California Civil Code Section 1942 states that if we are month-to-month (which we are at this point) and there are conditions that make the apartment uninhabitable then we are allowed to break the 30-day notice requirement of the lease. The list of things that make a place uninhabitable include: Uninhabitable conditions, which only need to affect habitability, not necessarily unlivable, and which may include: a. Infestations of cockroaches, rats, or other vermin, as well as effective waterproofing and weather protection of roof and exterior walls, including unbroken windows and doors. These are both issues we have had to deal with.

My ladyfriend and I were so livid it took us a lot to not scream at the poor bastards they have running the front desk there, but it's EXTREMELY hard not to get upset. Especially given all the other shit that was going on in my life and it being Father's Day weekend to boot. It's more stress than I ever expected for a birthday month. I don't have any solution to all this crap, but I know I'll get through it.

No matter what happens with the shitty rental place, we will be moved into our new apartment on July 1st and not be looking back at all. Just need to survive the next few weeks for things to have a chance to mellow out again. Push myself through this and on the other side I'll be a world of worry lighter.

Lessons for 2017

Following up from 2016's kick in the dick:

Only the Pos

Rhys Darby in Short Poppies as Terry Pole

I'm not planning to try to win any sexy leg competitions in 2017, although my pasty white northern pins would take the top spot for sure. The butt load of bad news that the end of 2016 dumped all over my life has been making it hard to keep my head from falling. I'm taking a lesson from Terry Pole:

I have a habit of self-reflecting and only seeing the faults when I do. It isn't that there aren't things that I feel positive about accomplishing, but there are other things I get so hung up on the negative aspects of that it stagnates all my efforts to make something else.

There are a lot of things I can't control in my life. Many of those things are what has kept my outlook bleak and my efforts stagnated. I can always spend my time wallowing in the things I can't change. That's too easy and won't lead to anything positive in the long term.

Fixing What I can When I can

Baby steps to 2018

The other night I was sitting at my desk not really sure how to spend what remained of my vacation and I noticed my cup from my morning coffee was still on my desk. I'd not planned on leaving it on my desk all day, but I waved away the minute long task with the idea I'd be able to take care of it later. There I was at the end of my day contemplating going to sleep and the minute long task of taking my coffee cup to the kitchen had been put off nearly the entire day for no real reason other than I told myself I'd find time for it later.

I realize I put off the smaller things, because I don't see the goal of accomplishing the small things as being worth the effort when I'm trying to figure out a way to get the bigger stuff done. That leads me back to self-reflecting on what I haven't gotten done; which only discourages me from putting effort into the next thing.

Small fixes/victories/accomplishments can add up if you let them. I know I can't change some of the immense things that cropped up in my life, so I can expect further stress from them. Small victories are still victories. I need to remind myself of that so that when I do manage to accomplish something I can take a proper measure of pride from the small victory and use that to fuel my efforts further.

In Closing

I'm not sure what I'll get out of this year. I had so much hope at the start of last year. I haven't lost hope. It's just been tempered heavily with reality. This year anything short of total thermonuclear war will be a pleasant surprise, so 2017 

2016 you've been a real kick in the dick

Like it says in the title. Such an enormously tall pile of bullshit was dropped onto the end of the year it skews the years overall worth sharply towards the negative side of things. It's too much to really even start listing without feeling the existential nausea kick in hard, so that's not what I'm gonna do here. I don't want to wallow in the misery of 2016. This is going to be all about making 2017 such a great year that it more than makes up for the events of 2016.

NaNoWriMo was a success. 52,678 words during the month of November. After it was over I lost track of the story. I didn't lose the story itself, but life and the holidays just drew me away from it with a suddenness I hadn't been prepared to handle. I feel like I learned a lot in the process of writing my story. I know the story was far from over or even really begun properly after all the words I put into it. I am hoping to spend some time in the start of this year to write up some of the lessons I learned from it for myself. Not as sage advice to pass on to others, but more to help my own understanding of how the process works for me so I can give it another go. I am gonna with the story I have so far, maybe finish it up if I can, or find a way to trim the size of the story I had in mind down. It snowballs every time I start to work on it though.

I've got a new camera it doesn't have a view screen for you to see the pictures you take with it, but it is digital so it has a massive and easy to access storage. I have always liked small toy digital cameras that take weird pictures I can't be sure will turn out until after I check them on a computer. I never liked the idea of taking 100 pictures for the 1 that you will show the world. That's fine for a professional photographer, but nothing I really need for myself. I'm hoping that I'll be able to use this year as a means to get handy at taking pictures with it. If not it will be fun at least to take pictures from my life for myself.

I've got a trip to central NY planned for the end of January to visit my family. My only thoughts have been on how cold it will be. Long Beach has been very cold lately, but it's still nothing compared to the frozen north country I'll need to trek through to visit my family. All of my colder clothes have slowly been moved out of my wardrobe over the years out here in the Southern California weather. Frost bitten extremities aside, it'll be nice to see my family again. It's been 3 or 4 years. That's the trouble of living with your younger self's life choices. Still trying to fix most of those.

I don't know what sort of plan I have for this blog in the coming year. I guess I'll just take it as it happens and see what I can get out of it. Maybe I should branch out to an easier format. Podcast or youtube channel or something. That'd be a lot easier for me to update and produce content to fill. My brother had mentioned some ideas before, but I don't ever know how serious to take his ideas.

Well here's to hoping 2017 turns out better than it looks.