But wait! There’s more!

What else has been happening that I don’t always have time to talk about and it pulls me in a billion directions so I forget what day it is and when I last talked about something…..?

Y’all probably saw this coming when earlier this year I got a hitch put on my Rav. I put off getting a trailer because … well, I don’t really have a good reason why. I was nervous? Nervous about committing, nervous about driving, nervous that it meant I was accepting that I was going to stay out here and give it a go, myself? I dunno. Maybe it was the universe telling me to wait until this specific trailer was ready.

My specifics for a trailer was that it was at least 4×8; I didn’t see the point in buying one that I couldn’t put a sheet of plywood in if I had to. I wanted sides, but Jeff pointed out that he could add sides, easily, to the metal sides that are there – just if I wanted to fill it with dirt, or mulch, and not have it all fall right out. A gate that could double as something I could drive my riding lawn mower up, if a friend wanted to borrow the mower, would be great. And that was pretty much it. Then I listened to Jeff’s advice; get one that’s got a longer tongue, get a longer one than I think I want because longer ones are actually easier to back up in than you think they’re going to be.

It was getting to the point with Home Depot rentals that I was like… let me just go ahead and buy one. We keep renting trucks from Home Depot, and the last one was… an experience. There’s still a lot of trash and stuff to pitch, so… let me just go down to Texas Trailers, take a look, see what they have. They had this 6×10 trailer, used, cheaper than a 4×8 new one. Like, half the price. SCORE. They were able to do the tag and everything right there, so it was easy peasy lemon squeezy. I’ve already driven it to the dump – more on that later!

Have I mentioned how much attention this dog needs?! I’m taking her outside for 20-30 minutes at 6:30, at 9, at 11, at 1, at 3, at 5, where I keep her outside until close to 6, and then again if she looks like she needs to go out between 7-8:30. After that, she crashes, and sleeps through until the morning. It is a good thing she’s cute as hell, and so lovable. I have to say… this dog would have annoyed the SHIT out of Tim. She is the kind of needy, the kind of “needs to be touching you” and “needs to be paid attention to” that would have driven him absolutely bananas.

Uh, no real reason to put this in here, just wanted to show people that I’m eating. Sometimes I’m eating things that are even healthyish!

According to Facebook, I am unreasonably hard on laptops (okay this one is possible), $500 laptops should last much longer than two years (for $500? Sure, Jan), I don’t need a new one I just need to defrag the one I have and check it for viruses (like I do every week on an automated schedule but whatever) and the fact that something zigged when it should have zagged and three years of my photos got deleted is entirely my fault and it’s probably because I don’t have an external hard drive or back up to the cloud. So this picture is of my external hard drive, and not that I’m accepting requests to prove I do my homework, but I back photos up to Amazon Photos (from both my phone and my computer as pictures appear on them), to Google Photos (from my phone, as I take them), pCloud (from both my phone and my computer as pictures and other files appear and/or are saved) and that once a month I back up everything on the computer to my external hard drive. I’m not completely sure how three years of photos got deleted from my laptop, but I think it was a glitch with deleting some things off pCloud to make room for something else and it borked itself… and it took a lot of time, energy, and data on my limited data-capped internet, but I got them all back. Crisis averted, thank you everyone for your lectures. I will not be telling you when I next buy a new laptop.

Last thing I want to say in this post (I think I have one more post coming tomorrow or the day after in this same series of “where is my time going) is that I recently went to a friend’s memorial service for her parents, who were married for 78 years. I know people who haven’t gotten 78 years of *life*… let alone marriages that lasted that long. I feel like I should say it made me a little sad that I know I won’t have a marriage that lasts for 78 years (do you count as “still married” when your spouse dies? Do you still celebrate your anniversaries as continuing? None of this is in the Widow Handbook.) (it is still really hard for me to relate to the term “widow,” it seems as if it should be someone much older than I am, someone who wears black for mourning, not because they’re Gen-X.) ANYWAY got sidetracked there a little. I feel like I should be sadly jealous, but I knew that ship had sailed when I got divorced from my first husband. I was almost 30 then, and in no way desiring to even hop back into dating, let alone another marriage. I knew I wouldn’t get to 50 years with someone. Now I really know it. I guess the only reason I’m not maudlin about it is because I already knew it wasn’t going to happen, even before I married Tim, let alone when he died. But also, I have some deep, rich, wonderful, loving friendships that I’ve had with people since my late teens and early 20s. Those relationships? We’re already at the thirty year mark in a lot of those, I bet we can push them to 50.

That’s about all I have time for here… more soon. The days start comin’ and they just keep comin’.