There are 3 able-bodied people in this house and all of them are blatantly fucking incompetent.! On Thursday I went into hospital for my total right hip replacement surgery. I came home 10 hours later to piles of dirty dishes, dog hair all over the floor, dog food teeming with flies and no support aids. It was the beginning of what has been the most disgusted and deeply disappointed I have ever been with the people in this house.
Just over two weeks ago, Bear’s teenaged children came to stay for three weeks for their Summer holidays. They are 16 and 17. All they’ve done for the past two weeks and four days is sit on their asses and stare at a screen. They make their own breakfasts and lunches and get their own drinks, leaving crumbs, juice, peanut butter, cutlery, dirty plates and glasses on the kitchen counter, making absolutely no effort to tidy up after themselves.
Bear can’t seem to keep less than 2 metres of kitchen countertop clean and spends his time sat in front of a screen too. Meanwhile I can barely walk, am lurching around on crutches in pain that’s barely controlled by my own self control, which right about now is slipping dangerously.! Yesterday afternoon I went off on Bear because for the third time in as many days I’ve had to clean up the sink surround in the kitchen because he hasn’t.
There’s food waste left on the countertop; breadcrumbs, sticky squash rings from the bottom of their glasses, small pieces of dog food strewn across the countertop, all of it being a sumptuous feast for the flies and nobody gives a shit except me.! As much as I’d like to leave that hazard to my health right there for someone else to deal with, I’m not stupid enough to believe anyone but me will even THINK about cleaning up that revolting mess.
They haven’t even thought to get the vacuum out to get rid of all the dog hair that’s like a carpet over the floors. The kitchen floor needs cleaning, the toilets need cleaning, Bear’s done one load of dark laundry in six days and no-one’s bothered to wipe down the door handles or stair rails with a hygiene wipe. I could fucking scream at the lack of effort being made for me by my ‘family’. Of course I’m the bad guy. Typically emotional, or just lashing out because I’m in pain.
Which to some extent might be true, but my pain doesn’t come from the traumatic surgery I’ve undergone, it’s from the hurt I feel that over the past six days, the people I am closest to have shown me that all the time I spend cleaning this house, making sure it is hygienically clean and ensuring they are safe from germs that could make them seriously ill is of absolutely no value at all.
In early March, Bear and I decided now was the time to start the process of moving house. We’ve been in this hellhole for more than nine years and finally the house prices had started to rise, so we could finally afford to get out and find something new in a much better neighbourhood. So he called around a few local estate agents and made appointments for them to call in and give us their best quote on what they thought we could sell our house for, bearing in mind our obnoxious shithead neighbours.
The first agent didn’t like dogs and gave us a lower than expected re-sale price. We crossed him off our list. The second agent loved dogs, was bouncy, smiley and personable and told us he could easily sell our house and gave us a pretty satisfying price. I hate bouncy people, but held off crossing him off the list because he loved my fur baby and had no problem being jumped on, sniffed and licked. The third agent liked the dog, but stank of cigarettes and the dog gave him a wide berth.
He gave us a similar value as the second agent, and mentioned that he’d already got a client in mind, an investor in houses in our area. We gave that some thought, but decided against it and waited for number 4. Who was late, very late and then despite liking my dog (yes, I do make life decisions based on peoples’ attitudes towards my dog) gave us a low re-sale price. I crossed him off the list. The following weekend the children stayed and as per, the girl child was riddled with germs and decided as is her wont, to spread them around.
Thankfully, I didn’t get ill, but Bear did. Oh, how he got ill… within a day he was coughing and wheezing, by the Sunday he had huge, red sores on his lower legs and felt exhausted. He took the children home on Sunday evening then collapsed on the sofa and slept until I woke him up to go to bed. Over the next three days he got steadily worse. The lesions on his lower legs spread and got bigger and more painful, he was feverish and coughed all the time and felt like death. He could barely stand up because his legs and feet were agonising if he wasn’t horizontal. He called the second estate agent back and secured his services and then called the doctor.
At first the doctor thought it was erysipelas, so she prescribed antibiotics and sent Bear to the hospital dermatologist, who said it looked a lot like Erysipelas, but it wasn’t, it was something else and worse. Back to the doctor, who hearing Bear’s breathing, referred him to a lung specialist and pulmonologist. Where he had a battery of tests as they tried to confirm what they suspected it to be, Lofgren’s syndrome, the acute form of Sarcoidosis. X-rays showed he had lesions on his lungs, heart and liver, as well as on his legs, arms and left hand.
The antibiotics had no effect because all this had been caused by a virus so Bear was left to suffer and struggle until his second appointment a week later with the lung specialist. Meanwhile, the second estate agent had come back, taken measurements and informed us that we had two weeks to get the house all bar emptied for the brochure photos, and then our house would be put on the market. Two weeks to sort through nine years of dumping stuff in the cellar we no longer used and getting rid of it and cleaning the house to the point of spotlessness.
Two weeks. I rose to the challenge, because I had no choice, Bear could do nothing but sit up on the sofa and rest, he had no energy, was grey and couldn’t stop coughing, so I did it all myself. In two weeks, I went through the cellar like a whirlwind, sorting through every box and bag, dumping 80% of it in a huge pile outside the back door to go in a skip and cleaned every room until it shone, hiding our personal possessions away in stylish boxes so the place looked like something from a magazine. The house hadn’t been so minimalistic since just before we’d moved in.
During that first week, the hospital phoned. They wanted to prep me for my hip replacement surgery three days later. I said no. I wasn’t leaving Bear alone when he was so ill. I needed to be there and I needed to get that house sorted out or we wouldn’t be going anywhere and I sure as hell wasn’t staying after getting Bear this far. I asked if I could postpone until we had moved and were settled and Bear was better and was told I could. They’d try to fit me in whenever I was ready. That is another reason I love Dutch healthcare.
The last weekend, Bear’s friends rallied round, one, an ex-military man and his son came to help me dump everything in a skip we’d hired, boxes of stuff that hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 30 years, boxes of rubble from the downstairs toilet project that had never been completed and the upstairs project that only just had. Another friend plastered the downstairs toilet walls so it looked at least like it was supposed to be something, and another came to take the dog out for a long walk. The poor little fella hadn’t had a walk in almost three weeks and couldn’t believe his luck.
By the time the photographer turned up to do the photos, the house was all but bare. She was in and out in 10 minutes and two days later, our house hit the market with a pretty healthy selling price. Now we had to keep the house clean and bare for the viewings. Which was not easy when it rained all the next week and the dog gave not one fuck about cleanliness. In the first week we had 17 viewings and took the dog over to The Mommy’s, to be spoiled rotten and filled with treats.
It was the first time she’d seen her son since he got ill and she was shocked. He was still grey, barely able to move and struggled to breathe after walking only 20 feet, he looked like a waif, having lost a lot of muscle mass and while he hadn’t lost weight, he looked like he’d dropped 50 lbs. He had no appetite, which definitely wasn’t him, and he could only eat bland food and drink water. He still had lesions but some were starting to fade. The coughing was now a major problem. On Friday of that week, we went back to the lung specialist.
He prescribed the highest strength anti-inflammatory painkillers to try to quash the infection and stomach lining pills. He took down every detail of what Bear had been going through from onset of symptoms to that day. He was convinced it was Lofgren’s syndrome and told Bear it would start to ease and should be gone within the next 5 weeks. Five weeks is a bloody long time when each day stretches before you lying on the sofa, with no energy, no appetite and coughing yourself hoarse all day.
Appointments with the pulmonologist, rheumatologist and repeated blood tests and lung capacity tests followed. They all knew it was what they’d thought it was but the pulmonologist wanted Bear to undergo a lung biopsy. He refused. He had enough trouble breathing as it was. Slowly with the help of the anti-inflammatory painkillers Bear started to get better, some days were a small step forward and some days were a huge step back. It took seven weeks for Bear to be free of the lesions on his skin and for the coughing to finally ease.
It’s been 13 weeks since Bear first got ill and he’s still not better. He still coughs in the mornings, tires easily and has limited energy. He can’t do very much to help with the house move, but at least he’s been able to view a house a day. We found a house in the same area his Mom lives, that has a similar configuration as this one. We move in four weeks.
After more than a year of putting up with my body trying to kill me, I finally went to see the doc and ended up here… in an MRI machine. It took it upon itself in early October 2020 to begin a campaign of terror in an effort to either kill me (my preferred option) or convince me that it was finally time to do something about the pain in my hips and lower back that had been going on, on and off, for more than a decade. Now, I know I have osteoarthritis, I’ve had it for nigh on sixteen years and was diagnosed in Germany in 2007-8 and I know the majority of my pain is caused by it, but the sudden onset of agonising pain was a surprise.
Apparently my body had had enough of said surprise, so proceeded to attempt a coup, randomly throwing me against stairs, the sofa, the bed and any other hard and very painful object by making my right leg give way beneath me. My balance wasn’t up to par before this bodily charade, but at this point I couldn’t even stand on my own two feet without being in agonising pain. I conceded the point and went to my favourite sadist, who prodded, poked and amazingly didn’t decide to stick a needle in me.!! Instead he sent me to the knee specialist, as we were of the opinion that my knee was likely the culprit. The knee was almost entirely innocent.
The knee specialist confirmed the knee was innocent, but felt the issue might be neurological, so referred me to the neurologist who sent me for an x-ray. Which solved the mystery in one foul swoop. My issue wasn’t neurological either. The guilty party was my right hip, which with no cartilage support to keep it from rattling around in there, was happily rubbing up against my sciatic nerve when the fancy took it, which was what was causing my leg to collapse and causing the agonising pain. With no cartilage left in my hip joint there was only one solution… a referral to the orthopaedic surgeon.
Who took one look at the lack of cartilage and told me I needed a hip replacement, stat.! So here we are… lying in an extremely cosy (yes, I’m claustrophobic) and very noisy magnetised tube, with headphones on listening to the radio between scans and wondering if I’ll develop superpowers…
Yesterday I went to the doctor’s because for the past three weeks my hands have been permanently hurting. I have arthritis in my hands and wrists and it’s been getting ever worse over the past year, but only recently have I noted that the aching pain just doesn’t go away by itself anymore. I also went because I had a large skin tag on my side from my bra strap rubbing. Now, my doctor is about 6 foot tall, blond, blue-eyed and always smiling, he’s a perky little bundle of joy, a husband and father, and the owner of a cute little golden Labrador. He’s also a sadistic fuck.! Which is probably why I like him. He has a cabinet in his examination room I call the Cupboard of DOOM because he keeps all the needles and other sadistic toys in there, bringing them out with a flourish that is very unbecoming in consideration of what they are and what they’re for.
Yesterday, after determining that the only thing he could do for my hands was prescribe a stronger painkiller, he invites me to step into his lair and sets about examining the skin tag, informing me he has just the thing for it. With his eyes alight from the huge grin on his face, he unlocks the Cupboard of DOOM, reaches in and with a flourish retrieves a small, flat blue box and shows it to me, as if looking for my approval. He holds it in the palm of one hand and opens it with the other, where on a bed of blue velvet-looking, moulded plastic lies a white curved wand with a square tab on the top and a two pronged round plastic disc with a corresponding square hole. Lying the open box on the examination bed next to where I was standing, he removes both, attaches the pronged disc to the wand and holds it up, telling me with an evil glint in his eyes ‘we’re going to BURN it off!’
“What.?!” I was expecting a cryotherapy wand, had braced myself for the sharp pain of Liquid Nitrogen like you get with warts, but no, that sadistic bastard was fully intent on burning that poor defenceless little skin tag and by design ME with electricity and Oh. My. God. Did it fucking hurt.! It took 3 ‘cuts’ to get rid of the tag and another three prods to cauterise the wound. Meanwhile I’m hissing through my teeth and biting my tongue to keep from cursing him out because not only can I smell my burning flesh, I can see around my raised arm that he’s loving every second of inflicting excruciating pain on me. It’s his thing. When he’s finally finished I breathe a huge sigh of relief and watch as he mops up the last of the blood with a tissue… and there is more than a fair amount of blood on that tissue. “That was a big one” he chuckles as he gets a pad and a large white plaster to dress my still throbbing side and then goes to wash his hands.
On October 30th last year my brother walked out on his wife of 26 years. They’d been together 33 years before he decided, on a whim to start afresh with someone new, saying nothing at all to his wife and two of his three children. The month before he left, he took his wife away for the weekend and couldn’t keep his hands off her, as she tells it, he was loving, attentive, constantly wanting to be beside her or touching her, telling her he loved her every single day. The night before he left he initiated sex with her and was gentle, considerate, loving and sensual. The next morning, he got up, made her breakfast in bed and told her he was going to visit his Mum and he’d see her later, he even kissed her goodbye. She texted our Mum to let her know he was on his way. Mum texted back to let her know they were out and would be all day, so to tell my brother not to bother. So my brother’s wife texts him to let him know our Mum wasn’t in and to not waste the journey. He texts her back to say he’s not coming back, he’s left her.!
She was absolutely devastated. They had no issues that she knew of. They’d never kept secrets from each other, as far as she knew, and to top it all, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.! She was a mess and justifiably so. Three days after he left, his house keys, phone and a note arrived in the post. The note just said he’d taken his name off the rent agreement for their house and all the bills were now in her name alone. The problem was she had no money. He’d gone behind her back and taken his name off of everything that was a part of their lives together, even closing down their joint bank account. Now she is alone, penniless and a month behind on the rent and all the bills. She can’t find work, because she has arthritis in her knees and ankles and she hasn’t worked since the day she gave it up to look after her firstborn back in 1992, so she has no valid qualifications. She can’t get benefits because all his stuff is still in her house and the DWP don’t believe that he has left her. She has no idea what to do with it.
My brother is living it large. He transferred his security job to a new hospital, lives with a woman in Bridlington, who has an autistic teenaged son at home, and only pays half her rent and his share of her bills. He gave his laptop to a mate after cleaning the whole system back to factory settings. He’s deleted all his old social media and opened new accounts. He hasn’t spoken to his wife or eldest daughter since the day he left. He spoke to his son on New Year’s Day and he only has contact with his youngest daughter when she initiates it. He’s destroyed everything he’s left behind, deliberately and cruelly.
It has been nearly three months since Bear tested positive for Covid and he still is not well. After the initial seven days of self-isolation, he felt better and seemed better in himself, other than experiencing a brain fog and being out of breath after climbing the stairs. He went back to work and was sent home within an hour after being doubled over trying to catch his breath after climbing a flight of stairs at work. He was sent to the doctors and given a fortnight off work to recover. After that fortnight he went back to work, still experiencing the brain fog, lack of breath and having a heart rate that was too fast. He worked four hours and was sent home again, exhausted. He slept for six hours.
He is not the only one of his work colleagues experiencing Long Covid symptoms. There are now four staff members who are unable to work more than 2-4 hours a day without feeling exhaustion and breathlessness. Bear worked for four hours every other day in December and was checked by the doctor who found no discernible improvement in his condition, so he is now working 2 hours, every other day. His health has not improved. He is not able to attend Covid Recovery Therapy because his heart rate is too high and his breathing too laboured. An otherwise strong, healthy man has been left with a limited lung capacity, a loss of memory and a too-fast heartbeat, all thanks to Covid.
Last night I went to bed at 11.15pm, after ensuring Bear was settled for the night and had everything he needed and wanted. He was very tired, his sinuses were completely blocked and he had a throbbing headache. I finally managed to sleep around 2am, completely exhausted after spending almost three hours crying and thinking about what I would do if he didn’t wake up. In April, a good friend of ours, a man named Ruud, only two years older than Bear died from Covid a fortnight after having a positive test result. He didn’t even have symptoms until the last three days and was admitted to hospital two days before he died.
This and the fact that Bear was completely fine yesterday evening, but by the time he went to bed he was really ill kept my mind actively presenting all manner of horrific pictures of having to tell his parents he had died, having to tell his children, having to organise his funeral and having to live without him. Needless to say I did not sleep easy and was awake at 5.10am straining to hear any tiny little sound from a sleeping man two floors below me. At 5.15am I slipped out of bed and downstairs to the basement to check on him. I needed to know if he was okay. When I heard him softly snoring I wept with relief.
Unable to go back to sleep I sat with the dog and read until 8.30am and then went upstairs and got dressed and started the day. At 10am I went down to see how Bear was doing and if he wanted coffee. He seemed a little brighter but was still stuffed up and croaky voiced, although he assured me he had no throat issues. I have insisted he comes upstairs to eat. We have a long dining table and if we sit at each end, there is a two metre space between us, plus it is the only time I will see him and know how he is doing. I made coffee, breakfast and freshly squeezed orange juice, any help I can give him to fight off this virus is worth the work.
After breakfast he went back downstairs and I got on with the housework. I did it all yesterday but I need to keep busy or I’ll fall apart. I’ve baked chocolate peanut butter oat bars and an American cheesecake and had dinner prepared well before time. This evening I’m watching the Ravens/Vikings game while Bear watches F1 downstairs. We’re keeping in touch via Messenger. My OCD is having a field day. If it’s not showing me horrendous images of my beloved in death it’s telling me I will die if any of those COVID germs gets to me and then shows me all the occasions on which I had kissed Bear before his positive test result. It encourages me to sanitise myself, the house, the dog and everything Bear has been within ten feet of. I am already using masks, gloves and hand sanitiser and wiping down everything before I touch it.
I have to keep telling myself not to go there. That I have to be stronger, for Bear, he has enough to deal with without me going full-retard (pardon the expression) because I’ve lost control of my mental health. I am not looking forward to another night alone.
This evening Bear tested positive for COVID. After spending the past 21 months protecting not only me but everyone else around him, wearing masks and gloves, using hand sanitiser and hygiene wipes, distancing and adhering to all the rules and regulations and willingly getting both vaccinations to ensure the safety of others, one utterly selfish piece of shit who refused to get vaccinated for whatever pathetic excuse they told themselves was acceptable, caught COVID and spread it around their workplace. Now Bear, to keep me safe, has self-isolated in the basement where he intends to spend the next 7-10 days alone. It’s his birthday on Tuesday.
I tested negative but it makes no difference. I too am alone. I am upset. I am angry and I am already stressed. I can’t hug him, I can’t kiss him and I can’t snuggle into him to sleep at night as I normally would. I can speak to him only over Messenger because of the callous attitude of one person who, even though they work in healthcare, decided their right to refuse was more important than the health of others. I am worried for him and I am scared, for myself, for his family and for his children. He is in his mid-fifties and a little overweight… a friend of ours of the same age died from COVID in April.
Over the past few weeks, Bear made contact with a roller blind specialist and told him about our external door blinds that have been making weird grinding noises and occasionally refusing to roll down. Said roller blind specialist came out to have a look, played with the buttons, watched the blinds go down and then back up and pronounced them to be completely useless and so outdated they couldn’t be repaired. These things are so old, they don’t even make the spare parts anymore. So getting them repaired is now a no go. Replacing them is also a no-go as I refuse to pay out for something we’re not going to be using for long. If the new owners want them, they can buy them.
Bear has again made an executive decision about the bathroom and I have washed my hands of the whole thing. After the support for the shower basin was installed and deemed to be an acceptable alternative, we discovered the shower basin had a long rent in the fiberglass underneath and decided to replace it. So Bear went to the DIY store and bought a new shower basin and a tin of white waterproof paint for the bathroom ceiling, which he’d been planning to sand over and re-paint. The ceiling is plasterboard and covered in black and yellow mould from not having an exhaust fan in the bathroom, because the ‘professional builder’ who put the shower in also put the ceiling up after removing the old, plastic cladding and decided not to bother re-instating the fan that was in there previously, leaving it hanging uselessly from the exhaust pipe as he casually installed the new ceiling. We didn’t realise until it was too late. So of course the bathroom absorbed the damp and everything went mouldy.
So Bear sanded it down and found the mould was only on the surface and hadn’t penetrated the plasterboard and decided that was good enough and painted over it. Only after he’d painted it did he let me know that the white paint he’d bought wasn’t white after all, but anthracite.! He’d picked up the wrong colour and rather than take it back and get white, he decided to use it anyway. Our tiny little bathroom now looks even smaller with it’s dark grey ceiling. This is not the end of the bathroom woes. Whilst Bear was at the DIY store he was inspired to finish the bathroom in a completely different way than we’d agreed to. Instead of re-tiling the walls around the shower basin he’s decided to use stick on wall panelling instead. Waterproof panelling granted, but still… the panelling is thinner than the tiles, so he’s now decided to plaster around the shower basin so he has the right depth to glue the wall panels on, and the wall panelling he’s chosen is dark grey to match the ceiling.!
On Tuesday I had an appointment with the sadistic knee doctors at the hospital after having an X-ray on my right knee to see what damage the calcium build-up has caused. The specialist was very charming and knowledgeable and looked around 16, if he was a day. He didn’t prod and poke me, didn’t manhandle my knee, didn’t even ask to look at it. He sat me down, showed me the calcium build-up in my kneecap which is lodged on the far edge of my kneecap, not even close to my tendons, so cannot be the cause of all the pain and discomfort I’ve been experiencing over the past year, and asked me what happens when I have these twinges. When I told him, he asked if I had a family history of neurological issues. Suddenly, everything clicked.! My father’s hands have shaken for more than 30 years and my grandfather’s left leg used to give him gip with random nerve spasms.
Eureka.! I have inherited neurological issues which have added to the hip and lower back problems I’ve had since I was pregnant with my eldest son. Quickest diagnosis ever.! I came home on Tuesday with a neurology appointment for December 2nd.
On Wednesday morning, Bear was browsing through the estate agents websites looking at houses when he shows me his iPad screen and says “your house has sold”. The actual FUCK.?!! Who the..? What the..? How.?!! WHY.?!! Nooooooooooooooooooooo.! *wails* My house.!! Upon further investigating (I made Bear call them and ask about it), some ass-hat phoned up on Tuesday afternoon, asked if it was still on the books and made an offer then and there. No viewing, no questions, just made an offer and waited while they called the mortgage people and got an acceptance. I was gutted.! I still am gutted. My perfect house is now someone else’s and I hate them. I hope they’re really miserable there. No, no I don’t. They’d better damn well be the happiest they’ve ever been in their whole lives in that house, as I would have been. Only then will I accept my loss. Bear showed me other houses, but I’m not interested anymore. When he’s finally finished that damned monstrosity of a bathroom and got this hellhole of a house valued and we have some idea of what we can get for it, then I’ll re-start looking for a new house. Until then I shall mope like a dumped girlfriend and listen to sad songs about houses and complain bitterly about being beaten to the best damn house EVER.!! 😦
Okay, I won’t… you know I won’t. There’s too much else to do to waste time wallowing in self pity. That house better have had a twin sister though and it better be available.! 😀
You learn something new every day and the past two weeks has taught me that Bear doing DIY is a bad idea. A VERY bad idea. Bear is not the DIY type and his attempts to repair the shower as cheaply, quickly and as hands-off as possible are really starting to piss me off.! He finally pulled the shower basin out after nine years of it leaking down into the downstairs toilet to find two supports still standing, half a breezeblock and two full cans worth of expanding foam, under which were the other two supports.
Nine years ago a ‘professional builder’ was paid a small fortune to install that shower. ðŸ˜
So Bear began by chipping the foam out to see what was under it. Once the foam was removed we discovered the breezeblock was balanced on top of the water pipes. The only support worth a damn for the shower that four people had been using for nine years was balanced on the water pipes that are about the only things holding the downstairs toilet ceiling up. The concrete floor under the shower is as thin as the water pipes embedded in it and crumbling. So Bear decided to build a support for the new shower basin by placing three house bricks at each corner and two at the corner with the plughole and then placing a piece of fibreboard on them with a brace of four supports in the centre, leaving the water pipes accessible.
Once that problem was solved, he set about carefully chipping out the concrete to lower the u-bend and plug for the shower so it fit better underneath the basin. Since then he’s been desperately trying not to continue the job. He’s gone no further and we’ve been washing our hair and doing full body washes at the kitchen sink. The children came for the weekend and had to forego showering until they got back home. And today marks two weeks since he started and the shower basin is still in the back bedroom, waiting to be re-installed. I knew I should have done the job myself.
Adding to the bathroom woes, I caught a stomach bug somehow and have been spending a lot of my days on the toilet. I have no idea what I got it from as I have eaten and drank the same thing as Bear and he’s fine and I haven’t been around anyone else. I’m starting to suspect the dog who loves to jump all over me for kisses and cuddles. He’s gotten very affectionate lately and it’s really irritating. I don’t mind cuddles, but when he forces his way onto me and starts lunging to lick my face it’s a bit much. He’s caught me a few times on my teeth and gums, so it’s likely I got a bug from him.
In the process of finding a way out of this house, I went through the websites of a few local estate agents and found THE house. MY house. The PERFECT house for us. A big, characterful house built in 1906, with an extension that houses a garage and a conservatory, with a garden that is half terraced and 12 metres by 10 metres.! There are four big bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge loft space and a large basement. I’m completely in love with this house and have already told Bear I want it. It’s been on the market for 18 months because it’s on a main road, although from what I can tell, it’s not all that busy, not that it matters as the living space is all in the back. I’m taking a wander over there tomorrow to see what it’s like around that area during the day.
Bear says not to get my hopes up as we may not be able to afford it, but I think it’s a little too late for that.! I have to wait for the realtors to come and see around our house and value it, so we can see how much more we’ll get for it than we paid and how much we can then afford to pay for another. I’m keeping fingers crossed that we’ll get a decent price, despite my bathroom doubts.
Back in late August I discovered a penpal app. called Slowly through a BDSM site on here. The poster was talking about a Dom she had as a penpal and the emotional support he was to her when she was going through issues with her own Dom. I’d never heard of Slowly but recalled the joy of writing snail mail letters to my grandmother when I was in my teens, so went in search of it. It’s basically digital snail mail, depending on how far away your penpal is depends on how long it takes for mail to reach them, anything from 30 minutes to 3 days.! You make an account, design a limited avatar, write a bio and make a list of interests. The app. can match you with other people who have the same interests or you can browse through the list of users yourself. I prefer to do the latter as the auto-match function will pair you with someone who might only have one common interest, whereas I’d rather make contact with someone who has seven or eight or more.
For the most part I’ve found that people are friendly, chatty and literate. There have been the usual pervs/scam artists/sexual predators as you’d find anywhere where people are connected, but there are settings to report and block them and block the area of the world they’re from if you so wish. So far I’ve blocked fifteen men and one woman for non-consensual sexual contact and reported a man for trying to scam me. Idiot.! On the plus side I’ve found a Staten Island cop with the best sense of humour, a man in Toronto, Canada who writes the most beautiful poetry and an erotic fiction writer in Tennessee who I’m helping understand what eroticism really is, as well as a Nigerian who loves Eminem (and no, he’s not a Prince :D), a Spanish musician and a lovely woman in New York who needs a big hug and I wish I could be there to give it to her.
Life has suddenly blossomed with these connections. The potential for long-lasting friendship depends entirely on me and how I respond. Obviously I knew there were other lonely people out there who needed a friend or someone to just listen to them but until Slowly there was no way to reach out and touch them and offer that support and friendship. Now instead of sitting and watching Bear exist online, I can exist online myself for a while sharing my story and thoughts and ideas with others. The only issue I have with this app. is how darned long it takes to receive each letter. 😀
Bear started work on the bathroom today, cutting through the rubber sealant and pulling out the shower basin to find a half ton of expanding foam underneath, under which was buried two of the four supports for the shower basin, which explains why the damn thing was sloping to the left and all the grouting around the tiles was cracking and allowing water to seep through into the downstairs toilet. A professional job in this city is obviously to use as much expanding foam as possible. Thankfully the only major damage was the wooden supports beside the shower that connect to the floating toilet. Easily replaced and secured.
I also had an appointment with my gleefully sadistic GP about the calcium build-up in my right knee. It’s been rapidly becoming a bigger pain in my rear by the month and after a few near misses on the stairs, I am about ready for it to be cut out so I can get back to walking like a real girl and not waddling like a constipated duck. Said GP, after prodding, poking and manhandling my knee decided this was no ordinary calcium build-up and didn’t offer to stab me as is his wont, but has referred me to the sadistic knee specialists at the hospital for them to poke and prod and manhandle me instead. Okay, I don’t know if they’re actually sadistic, but I’m assuming they are because they specialise in an area of human physiology that would involve sticking needles in people on a daily basis. I’m only assuming that they enjoy it.
Someone else who would likely enjoy sticking needles in people is Bear, who has recently passed his Nursing degree, finally and is now an RN (Registered Nurse). The lads and I have been ribbing him about wearing a sexy white dress and glasses on his nose and using his stethoscope for completely inappropriate uses. 😀 You have to take the opportunities when they present themselves. I’m so proud of him though, it’s been a tough four years and he’s been so stressed and strung out about passing this as it means he’ll get a pay rise and we can finally afford to get the hell out of this house and into something bigger, somewhere quieter which is all we’ve wanted for the past nine years.
I am worried for him and I am scared, for myself, for his family and for his children. He is in his mid-fifties and a little overweight… a friend of ours of the same age died from COVID in April.
Dear Diary... 
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