Greetings, friends. (XI)

Greetings, friends. Today feels like it has been an immensely long day, even though I have barely been up for twelve hours. I have been staying at my mother’s in New Hampshire, where there was a foot of snow on the ground when I flew in on Friday, and another foot of snow is falling as I write this.

I slept in this morning, because I badly needed it, and got out of bed just in time for Adah to come over with coffee, bless her, so that we could dig back into the, shall we say, situation, that is our late mother’s house.

Yesterday, she and I went through the house and dug out every piece of historical re-enacting kit and loose fabric we could find, while Keith bagged up my mother’s old lady wardrobe for good will. We are expecting a number of her historical re-enacting friends to come over Wednesday to help us begin to filter through it.

That was yesterday. Today, we decided to pivot to the somewhat more sedate task of sorting through our mother’s papers and mementos. We threw away a lot of unopened and outdated mail, and then got to the good stuff. Some of it was delightful and some of it was heartbreaking.

We spent about four hours on the task and got maybe halfway in. Maybe. I count seven large garbage bags in the kitchen, and that’s just what we’re throwing away. I don’t have the energy to tell you more about it today. I will share that tomorrow, I hope.

Adah left, and I spent some time cooking, because although I may be alone for a week and a half in a remote frozen hellscape, I am determined not to suffer too badly.

For lunch, I diced a nearly frozen chicken breast, sautéed it with smoked paprika, crushed garlic, and red chili flakes, and served it (to myself, natch) on corn tortillas, with melted cheese, ripe avocado, and onions that I quick-pickled the last time I was here.

Then, for dinner, I quickly seared a 2½ lb. beef bottom round that I picked up, after frying some shallots and garlic in the oil. Then I braised the whole thing in equal parts beef stock and some ruby port that I found in my mom’s house that was a little too old and corked to be worth drinking.

While that was bubbling away on low, I called up one of the shooting ranges I found in the area, and then drove up there with my new handgun to try it out.

I drove up there! Right, I may or may not have mentioned — for the first time in my life, I now also own a vehicle that isn’t 10 or, more usually, over 20 years old. Three years of driving a 3rd generation Toyota 4Runner that I have done absurd things to and with has likely made me a Toyota customer for life. They’re by and large ridiculously durable, and the older ones are easy for a novice like me to wrench on.

Well, even before my mother passed, I knew I was going to be spending more and more time here in New Hampshire, and I had already started thinking about getting a vehicle. Adah and Keith have two cars, but they both work full time jobs in opposite directions from their home. They were good enough to lend me a car for a few days or a week at a time, but any longer would’ve been asking too much.

I thought about it, and realized that I was going to need a vehicle that I could use to haul furniture, or garbage to the dump, or (for example) twelve bags of old lady clothing to Goodwill. So I initially out to find an inexpensive used Toyota Tacoma here in New Hampshire.

The plan kind of mushroomed. As we went through the house and the barn on an initial posthumous inspection, it became very clear that there were going to be enough heirlooms and mementos and whatnot that I wanted to keep, that I was eventually going to need some way to haul it all back to Washington. Which meant spending more money to get a truck that would be able to haul a small trailer and also have a high likelihood of surviving the cross country journey. After this, I would sell the truck on the West Coast.

I quickly discovered that the underbody and engine compartment of every car in New Hampshire older than about five years is absolutely covered in rust. The wet climate, combined with winter after winter of road salt, just destroys automobiles. When presented with this observation, Adah agreed cheerfully, “Yeah, that’s why Keith and I just buy new cars and drive them until they fall apart.”

The problem is that pickup trucks on the West Coast are largely not covered in a thick layer of rust, and that a vehicle that was would be hard to resell. So, almost on the spur of the moment, I flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina, to enlist my father’s help in buying a truck there.

To abbreviate an already long-winded story, I settled on a 2017 Toyota Tacoma, in white, with the longer 6’2” ft bed — because I am over 6 feet tall, and I like to be able to sleep in the back of my vehicle when I go camping — and also the extended cab, because, well, that was what was available. I take some consolation in knowing that Besha’s chihuahua and pit bull are likely to be more comfortable back there than they would’ve been in the access cab.

I drove the Tacoma back up here over my winter break, and then went back to the West Coast. When I get it back to Washington, I will likely seek to sell the 4Runner. The 4Runner’s name, because reasons, is Muad’Dib. Which basically means that the Tacoma’s name can only be, logically, Leto the Second of House Atreides, God-Emperor of Arrakis and the Known Universe.

To my astonishment, I was able to finance the whole thing. Honestly, it even seemed wise to do so, given that I have other debts with much, much higher interest. Even with interest rates on the rise, it is cheaper for me to borrow money to buy a vehicle under five years old, than it is for me to borrow to buy real estate. I suppose one of the two is easier to repossess.

Capitalism, man. I sort of understand how it works but I still don’t really get why it works. I’m not sure it actually does. I’m really, really fortunate to be privileged enough to bend it to my advantage sometimes, and I do not ever forget that.

I was going to tell you about the shooting range, but I guess I will save that for another day, too. My point was that after sorting through Mom’s effects with Adah, and then cooking, doing enough Duolingo to keep from dropping out of the Obsidian League for the week, then driving to the shooting range before it closed, shooting for an hour, driving back, going for a two mile run on Mom’s treadmill, and dining on a bit of the braised beef over spinach with avocado, while watching the 49ers squeak past the Cowboys…

Man, I am bushed. I didn’t have time to write this morning, and by the time, I’d done everything else, well… at that point I was procrastinating on writing so hard, that I actually washed all the dishes in the kitchen, before I finally opened my laptop and dialed up Substack. That’s how you know I didn’t feel up to writing today.

But I did it, and then some. I think eventually I’m going to start giving myself the occasional day off from writing, but “it is not this day.” If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See ya tomorrow.