Tag: homeownership

I want a machete

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Actually, I should rephrase that headline: I am getting a machete.

I’m not particularly fond of doing any sort of yard work or landscaping.  The idea of having a nice-looking property is, nice, but I don’t particularly want to put forth the effort in doing it myself, and I don’t particularly want to pay what I feel is outlandish rates and be locked into contracts with a landscaping company to have someone else do it for me.  So it usually ends up with me doing the bare minimum to have a remotely passable yard, as in the grass remains cut, and the edges are barely maintained, but there’s not much in terms of fresh mulch, neat little accents or any of the small things that make yards look pretty.

But when things become what I think are necessity, then I guess I’ll go ahead and put a little more effort into things.  I have some shrubs that really need to be tamed, because I’ve literally watched squirrels use them as a springboard onto my physical home and for those that know me, I fucking hate squirrels, and the idea of them infiltrating my home now makes me feel homicidal, so I need to nip this in the butt before it becomes problematic.

Furthermore, my property is adjacent to county-owned land, so in some regards it’s nice to not have a neighbor on one side of my house, but in the other hand, the county doesn’t particularly do a good job of maintaining public land, so there’s a good bit of brush and wild growth that has encroached onto my property that needs to be tamed as well.

Needless to say, it’s more work than a trimmer and blower would be capable of doing, but I don’t want to spend the money to get some power tools for what is basically amounting to a single job.  Frankly, in my mind, a good afternoon with a machete is what I really need, so I went online and ordered, a machete.

It’ll be interesting when it gets here, because I’ve never actually used a machete for its intended purpose, and only known of them for fantastical scenarios of killing zombies.  In my mind, it’ll be a gratifying, satisfying and a stress-reliever of an activity, hacking away at wild plants and shrubs, while at the same time bringing order to my property and gaining land back from the county.

But I know there’s an equally strong chance that I am underestimating the whole task, and that ten minutes in, I’ll find that a machete isn’t that efficient, or that there are some plants that are far too thick for a machete to be of much use, and I’ll be exasperated and disappointed with the results, throw in the towel, and end up springing for some power tool(s), and just be behind on my anticipated timeline of getting this task done.

I won’t know until I try though. The machete is en route, and pretty soon we’ll see if it’s everything I hoped it would be, or if I’m going to regret making this decision, and be angsty about the time and money wasted.

A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I ran 13.1 miles to fulfill the obligations of the Disney Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Half Marathon that mythical wife and I signed up for months ago.  We were itching for redemption to run it this year, as we had to bow out the year prior with lots of sour grapes on how runDisney handled it, because of a little unexpectedly quick turn around on pregnancy, but we signed up for it in 2020, thinking we would have our opportunity to redeem ourselves as well as introduce our little one to her first Disney trip.

Among other things ruined on account of coronavirus, this too was denied to us again for a second year, but we opted to stay registered and run our half marathons virtually.

Mind you, in spite of having obligations of a half marathon, I’ve basically been living on auto-pilot for large swaths of the year, and I hadn’t really done any proper distance training leading up.  I run regularly, but only around three miles per run, mostly for maintenance and health purposes, and not necessarily with a distance goal in mind.  Regardless, because I was planning on doing run/walk, I was still confident that I would be able to pound out 13.1 miles without killing myself.

Sure, some preparation probably would have made things easier, but I did just that, and finished my half marathon’s distance without dying.  I admittedly hit a wall a little faster than I had hoped, and by mile 10 I was running out of gas pretty quickly, and my right calf was telling me that it was very unhappy with my choices in life, but I still finished, and under my goal time of 2 hours and 30 minutes to boot.

I figured I would be in pretty rough shape afterward, seeing as how such was usually the case whenever I’d done any prior 10K or 10-milers in the past, with training, but the following day, it was nothing more than the atypical tender quads and achy ankles, leading me to be quite satisfied that I wasn’t a complete train wreck of a physical specimen after having not been to the gym in literally eight months.

A day ago, as is something that always has to be done this time of year, I went outside and raked leaves, as I have three very large trees on my property, and therefore have a metric fuckton of leaves to have to rake.  It was a massive pain the ass last year, as I had but a cheap wire rake that I had procured from Amazon, so I decided to not be a cheapskate and get myself a real, effective rake, even if it meant that I had to leave my house and go to a Home Depot to buy one. 

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New Father Brogging, #021

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my paternity leave winds down, I naturally feel like the last six weeks have blown by, and that I wish I had more time.  Mentally, I’m not really that prepared to return to work yet, but it’s not like I really have much of a choice if I want to be able to provide for my family, other than to suck it up and get back to it.  But I definitely wish I had more time, without a doubt.

Overall, the last six weeks have been mostly anything but easy, as raising a child is definitely no small feat, and I should be fortunate that I even had the luxury of paternity time in the first place.  As necessary as it most certainly felt to me, the reality is this is something that my company did not have in place when I first started there, which wasn’t even a full five years ago.  I remember the big deal it was within the company, and even getting some national news traction about how when we went full paternity, and thinking nothing of it back then, because I wasn’t even married yet, but having capitalized on it now, I couldn’t be more grateful to work for a company that offers it, because I know that such is not the case everywhere else.

But throughout my paternity leave, my child has grown a bunch, begun eating solid foods, competently rolling over front to back to front, has graduated out of swaddles, and has been teething, chatting a lot more, and we’ve begun trying to get her to sit up on her own strength.  One of my prime hopes was that while I was off, we’d be able to get her into a casting call for some sort of baby company, and put her to work a little bit, and once she actually did get put on a shortlist of candidates, but then they hit us with the curveball that all babies would be required to be able to sit up on their own power.  Bummer

Aside from baby-ing, over the last six weeks, I managed to get my brog back up and running, although it’s an indeterminate time to whether when or if I’ll ever get the pre-2010 archives back up and running, because that’s way lower priority than the brog.  I also had some house issues, when some freakish storms exposed some leaks in my home, which turned out to be a time consuming and costly ordeal in its own right, which really messed me up, and I also found out that my own dad has been having some minor health issues on his own, leading to my sister and I to have some real talks about the inevitable future.

Needless to say, it’s been a time during paternity leave, and it’s hard to comprehend that these six weeks have evaporated so quickly.  Put being on full-time daddy duty 10-12 hours a day, with next to no help and practically no down time for myself, and it’s been very understandable when people try to expound the difficulties of parenthood.

To reward myself and/or indulge in some retail therapy, I decided to get myself a new belt, as well as track down my own belated birthday gift, in this sweet Power Rangers T-Rex DinoZord.  And the belt is mostly as a result of an Amazon gift card my sister got me for my birthday when her own attempt to get me the T-Rex stalled out due to a flaky seller in Japan, and much like Target gift cards, I’m left with a wtf do I purchase, until it came to my attention that Amazon actually had a few people selling legitimate belts.  So now I have a Ring of Honor tag replica, that guys like Kyle O’Reilly, Bobby Fish, the Young Bucks, Hardys, AJ Styles, Kevin Steen Owens, Cesaro, CM Punk and Seth Rollins have held in their histories.

And modeling the belt is my new life-long tag team partner.  As intensive as some parenting might have felt at times, I wouldn’t take anything away from the last six weeks, and I’m sad that it’s likely I’ll not get another massive chunk of time like this to spend with my child for the immediate future.

The cold equations of life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There was a sci-fi story I read in high school that I always remembered called The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.  In short, it was the story about a guy who was piloting a supply ship through space, to deliver medical supplies to a mining colony on another planet.  However, unbeknownst to him, a young girl, hoping to hitch a ride to the colony where her brother was located, had stowed away and was discovered after the ship had launched and was already in route.  She thought the punishment for her discretion would merely be a fine, but quickly learned that the ship had only enough fuel to make it to the planet and did not account for the weight she had added to the ship. 

In other words, her stowing away jeopardized the lives of herself, the pilot and the colonists depending on the medical supplies because the ship didn’t have enough fuel to haul the extra weight and would fall short of its destination and crash.

Initially, the pilot was callously instructed by his superiors to jettison the girl off the ship and continue the journey, and naturally he showed tremendous reluctance at the thought of having to kill someone; but it was a matter of kill one person to save the many people who needed the medical supplies, or jettison the medical supplies in order to save the girl. 

Spoiler alert: they deliberate for so long that it doesn’t even matter; after jettisoning the medical supplies, it turns out that a little thing called physics had already come into play, and they’d been flying overweight for long enough to where the girl needed to be unloaded anyway, due to fuel constraints.  The pilot is mentally murdered by having to push the button on someone’s life, the colonists on the planet do not get the medical supplies, and he is arrested and imprisoned for insubordination. 

Everyone loses.

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When the day is over, you just have to do the shit yourself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because my mental being can’t handle loose ends, I decided to take it upon myself to put back up my own fucking fence, so that it’s one less thing that I’ll have to dump money into when it comes time to (hopefully) finding someone competent to fix shit around my house.  As mentioned before, in the process, I fucked up my finger pretty bad, but fortunately it wasn’t in a state where I couldn’t just bandage it up, wear gloves and not be able to continue working.

To summarize, among the shit that the clown of a “handyman” I “hired” to fix my window did, was not just remove several fence panels,  but also damage the posts in in the process of fishing the $450 scissor lift rental I made on his request, off of my backyard, which also tore the shit out of my turf (photos below).  He claimed that he would take responsibility for the damages, but shocking nobody, he’s been as evasive and vague as an extreme cheapskate when the bill shows up, about when he’s actually coming to do anything, and frankly I don’t actually believe he’s going to do anything, and I’m going to light him up on the internet and hope it hurts his future business, because an asshole like this doesn’t need to be out there pretending to be a respectable handyman.

During the days of ghosting, I would step outside and just look at the unfinished job of the fence, and get madder and madder, and I realized that this was not good for my mental state.  Just because I didn’t want to do it didn’t mean that I wasn’t capable of doing it, and considering the sloppy nature of this guy in the first place, it would probably be in the best interest if I did it myself, to ensure that it would be done well.

So janky finger injury aside, I assessed where things stood, and came to the conclusion that this was one of those situations where I would just have to do this shit myself.

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I wonder if I need therapy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Easy set up aside, I’m not trying to be funny at the moment.  Over the last few days, and dealing with the clown of a handyman who has for the lack of better term, fucked me, I haven’t been dealing with the frustration over it very well, and it’s bleeding out in various capacities.  As detailed, I got my glasses broken from negligence, and there have been other instances where I’ve made some careless errors that were fortunately nothing too bad other than aggravation.

But yesterday, since I’ve decided to take it upon myself to fix the fuck ups of my shit handyman, I had an incident where I nicked my ring fingertip with my belt sander; no, it’s nothing severe, but some blood was drawn, and it was in a terribly inconvenient place that made typing competently near impossible until I procured some appropriate fingertip Band Aids, which is how I’m back at the keys writing this right now.  You never realize how much a single finger comes into play with an assortment of daily activities until it’s put on injured reserve.

In all honesty, the meme above, about the try not to cry, but then cry a lot?  That’s kind of how I’ve felt on and off throughout this past week, and I’m feeling very mentally vulnerable right now.  I’m not sure if this is just extremely poor stress management, perhaps this is quarantining cabin fever manifesting in emotional instability?  Maybe it’s the anxiety of knowing I feel like the first three weeks of my paternity leave has vanished in the blink of an eye and now I’m on the downward slope of going back to work sooner rather than later.  My dog is also acting a little strange, which isn’t helping, because I already feel like a shitty enough neglectful owner because baby comes ahead of everything, but at least he’s getting his meals and routine bathroom breaks and not locked in his crate eight hours a day like when I was in the office.

Or maybe it’s all of the above, and it’s an amalgamation of factors leading me to feeling like maybe I need some professional help to help me make sense of why I’m in such a mentally turrible state lately.

And no matter how much I talk to myself about how I really shouldn’t be in this much of a funk, here I am.  I have my health, I have a stable job, in spite of some recent angst about it, I have a beautiful and loving wife who supports everything about me, and I’ve got the most gorgeous and precious kid that I have the utmost luxury to be taking care of every single day right now.  Frankly, even I don’t think I should be feeling so volatile given these facts, but I just can’t shake it right now.

I’m hoping that once I get my property back in order, I’ll feel better about things, as the visual results of having been fucked will be behind me.  But if that doesn’t work, I think I may explore what my options are, and/or see if my insurance can be of any help at all in this.  Who really knows what’s going to happen in the future, but I’ve never been one against the idea of therapy, but I’ve always felt like I just didn’t need it, but if things can’t seem to get better through all of the channels that I’ve been using throughout my life so far, perhaps some professional help might not be a bad idea.

I owe it to my wife, child and rest of my family and friends to be the best I can be, and not be so wrecked by stupid shit.  Maybe a good cry is what I really do need, like in Fight Club.  Would probably be a lot cheaper than therapy!

Am I naïve for having so much faith in people?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sorry, I just can’t get over this yet.  I wasn’t really planning on writing about this again, but on the day my handyman was supposed to come back and finish fixing my fence, he no-showed on me, citing that he was going over on another job he had, which is understandable, but the objection I have is the fact that he had stated that he was going to make it by a particular time.

I’m okay with the need to reschedule and adjust, but don’t leave me hanging and make me have to be the one to get some fucking answers when it was probably very clear that the job was going to be going long, and I wouldn’t have had to feel like a hostage in my own house waiting all day, because I wanted to talk to this guy before he got to work to point out some things.

Alternatively, the title of this post would’ve been “To blow up, or not to blow up,” because I’d been thinking about this a lot over the last day, about whether or not I should light this guy a new asshole on the internet for the absolute putrid way he’s running a business.  There’s a part of me that just wants this to all end, and leave things civil, and let an up-and-comer not get obliterated on the internet, but there’s another part of me that’s sick and tired of constantly waiting for this guy to show up, the fact that when he did show up, he fucked me harder than Andy Dufresne probably did in Shawshank Redemption, and that I’m practically waiting on him to cut-and-run on me, leaving me at more than just a $450 loss.

Originally, I figured I wouldn’t bother, because as shitty of a business this guy is running, I have reservations of blowing up a guy with a million kids and clearly in need of a job, because a bad reputation isn’t just going to cost this guy a few projects, but could very well be the difference with him being able to provide for his family.

But seeing as how he’s clearly got other projects, ones that he prioritizes over mine, which he royally fucked up, I’m a little less piteous of his situation, and I’m feeling pretty steamed over the fact that he left me out to dry.

Continue reading “Am I naïve for having so much faith in people?” →