Death and Divorce: Viable Options

When I was a Realtor I always considered it my primary task to remove as much stress from my clients as I possibly could. Why? Because studies showed that moving created stress near the levels of having a loved one die, or going through a divorce.

I think Julie would have happily taken either of those options yesterday. Instead, she got to move into her “In-Laws” house (cue creepy horror music).

Stressed Out

It was not nearly as hard for her to move into her parents house. It was a house she was familiar with, it was her parents instead of mine, and mostly because she knew it was a temporary home.

This time things are different. This time the house is new to her. She hasn’t lived here before, she doesn’t have a history of where things have been located in the house, she doesn’t have childhood memories there, there isn’t as much finished space, and other such reasons make this much harder emotionally for her.

And the owners of the house are new. The household ‘norms’ are different. She is trying to be more cautious about ‘stepping on toes’ since she hasn’t lived with my parents before. She’s feeling very self-conscious about changing the way things have been done before, in a house she doesn’t feel is “hers” yet. She doesn’t want to hurt feelings and has to think about more than she did while living with her parents.

And this is a permanent move. Rather than going to her parents just temporarily and knowing she’ll get out of there again, she knows this move is not. That she won’t be leaving here anytime soon. That is hard. This isn’t where we ‘want’ to be. If we had a magic wand to wave and choose where to live, it wouldn’t be here. We’re here because of circumstances; not because it is our lifelong dream to move in with my parents (Sorry Mom).

The knowledge that this is a permanent (or at least very long term) is stressful, especially for Julie. It’s not easy on me, but I feel really terribly bad for my sweetheart.

“It’s Fine”

We have a running joke where when we aren’t really happy about something we just tell each other “It’s fine! It’s fine!” with a certain emphasis that tells the other that we’re jokingly not thrilled. Julie keeps telling me that “It’s fine’ but without that emphasis.

She says it’s fine, but she is lying. I caught her crying yesterday while trying to move in. The stress of trying to organize ourselves into a house with people already living in it was winning the day. I held her and told her things would get better. That little by little it will feel more like home, and that she is welcome to make it her home.

And today is a better day. She is more carefree and happy. It’s will be a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I’m sure it will trend toward happiness.

She really will be fine. She is amazingly strong and resilient. And she’s been through worse. Afterall, she did move me into an unfinished home, in December, with no insulation, no internal plumbing, no walls, no electricity, and no flooring (concrete and plywood was all), and she considers it a great memory.

We’ll be fine and things will work out. Hopefully without the Death and Divorce involved.

But if you see Julie, and feel inclined, please pass on your encouragement and love. She might need them more than usual over the next few weeks.

And please forgive her if I’m wrong and she strangles me in my sleep. Even I would understand! 🙂

5 August 2017

Update After My Hiatus

I’ve been on a hiatus and think I should give an update on life. With nothing really going on I just haven’t found anything to write about. Of course things have happened, but they all seem so small and insignificant at the time that they don’t seem worth mentioning. It is only in the accumulation of seemingly insignificant changes that the scope of the change becomes apparent.

HOUSE PROJECT UPDATE

Things aren’t moving as quickly as I’d like, but they are moving about as quickly as they could possibly move. We finished the wiring/plumbing/etc last week; HVAC was installed last week, and the sheetrock was hung this week. The sheetrock mudders will be in on Monday. By the end of the week we should be able to paint.

While the sheetrock was going up this week we were working on the deck that is going out the south side of the great room (going to have to stop calling it that because now it is a collection of small rooms that are no greater than any other rooms). We have the supports up and joists up. We don’t have any decking or railing on yet. That might happen this week while the mudders have us out of the place again this week.

As soon as we can get back in we will paint just as quickly as possible and then get to finishing the bathroom and working on flooring.

I will try to get some video edited of what the space looks like out to you soon!

MISSOURI/FINANCES UPDATE

We have accepted (grudgingly) that we won’t be moving back to MO anytime soon. This is sad. We don’t want to lose the property though just in case we ever do find a way to get back there.

Even though we are way under water on the mortgage for a house that no longer exists, we have still been making the payments. I’ve tried reaching the bank to see if we can work something out but they refuse to speak to me. If nothing else I’d like to get approval to lower my payments since there is no insurance on the property (why would there be?) and the taxes are going to be MUCH lower now with no home.

We have sold our cattle. They have been at a neighbors house since the fire and he took care of them over the winter. I had him haul them to auction this week and should get a check for them soon. That will help out a lot of things!

We haven’t decided how/when we are going to collect the rest of our things. I think it is feasible to have everything loaded into my storage unit and then ship the entire thing here to Utah, but I don’t have a good way of getting it all loaded. I could ask friends/neighbors to do it for me, but that seems like a big ask. Maybe my Dad goes back and does it with help. May I have to do it? Still undecided.

FAMILY UPDATE

Everyone is fine. Caitlin (15) and Joshua (13) had birthdays. Everyone is healthy and enjoying the summer. They’d like to not be working at my parents so much, but it hasn’t been bad. With frequent (near daily) trips to the pool or the new splash pad in Bluffdale they are all getting out a lot. They’ve done some hiking and sports too.

I think everyone is apprehensive about the move. We know my parents place won’t be done. We only have 2 weeks from today, so I don’t even know what state of cleanliness it will be in. But school is starting, so we will move in regardless and make the best of it. Maybe with school starting it will help make things easier for Julie and I to get things into a more livable condition.

VA/MENTAL HEALTH UPDATE

I’m surviving. I’m still going to all my regular appointments (several a week) and getting by.

I have started and completed the beginners portion of Canines with a Cause. I still don’t have my own dog but have been working with their dogs. The first part of the intermediate class that begins in a few weeks will be looking for my own dog. The timing is working out fine since I couldn’t have my own here at the Penrod’s, but can have one as soon as we move. This will go a LONG way to helping my anxiety and will hopefully be beneficial in dealing with nightmares too.

Julie is still crazy!

EXERCISE/HEALTH UPDATE

You haven’t seen any running logs since the pool opened because we stopped running. We have instead been swimming. I have the kids do laps each time we show up to keep them doing some cardio, then they are free to go play (which rarely includes actual swimming).

My exercise has been fine, but hasn’t resulted in any weight loss. I think it has trimmed up my waist a little bit (several people have mentioned it), but my actual weight hasn’t gone down. Perhaps with time.

27 June 2017

Penrod Family Reunion

Yesterday was the Penrod family reunion (Julie’s family). The desired location was Payson Lakes in southern Utah County. We had five out of six families show up and had a great time.

Highlights

With 26 people it was tough to catch them all on video or camera without making it a dedicated goal, which I didn’t. I’m not sure even all of my own kids made it on here, so my apologies to anyone who feels like they got shorted or left out.

This was just a one day event at the lake. We enjoyed the day just relaxing and playing water sports. The paddle board and kayaks were a great hit and even the little kids loved the water. I think all but three people got in and got wet.

Three of the families actually decided to do some camping the night before, and so they all got together for a pre-reunion campout. The other two families (including us) arrived around 11 am and stayed until approximately 5pm. It was about as much sun as I could take.

The sun burns were surprisingly mild and I was only worried about one child getting heat stroke/exhaustion (mostly because of the ride home with grandparents when the AC stopped working).

Lots of water, lots of fun, and lots of laughter. It was a fantastic way to spend the day. I hope that everyone else felt the same way. We’ll look forward to the Penrod family reunion again next year.

16 May 201715 May 2017

An Entirely Different Species

Julie’s Mother’s Day gift

For Mother’s Day Julie updated all of the photographs on her mother’s mantel. During the Christmas holiday 2016, Blake had paid a photographer to come take family photos since the entire family was in town. These photos were available long ago, but no one had printed them out.

All in all they were a good set of pictures. It is a good looking family and everything seemed normal in the photos. Until one giant problem was noticed. We had discovered an entirely new species, and it was captured in the photos. Look closely below and see if you can see it!

Not the same species!

Did you find it? If you look closely at the center of the photo you’ll find it. It is very round, covered in hair (except on top of it’s head), and is wearing a gray T-shirt. I’m talking about me of course!!

Look at the sizes of the people in that photo, and tell me that I don’t look like I’m an entirely different species! Look how small my entire family looks next to me. Either I have giant blood, or they are part dwarf. Either way, we couldn’t possibly come from the same gene pool, could we?

Further Research

Of course, one photo might be a fluke. I might have been on a hill. The others were in a hole. The angle of the camera just distorted the way I looked. Of course I’m not some weirdly huge new species, right?

So we decided that we would needed more data. So we checked out the photo of the ENTIRE family. Two of the brothers-in-law are fairly tall. Surely a second photo will prove that the first photo was just an odd picture. And what we found was…

… sure enough I must be an entirely new species.

HOLY COW I’M HUGE!!

I’m not sure how it happened, but apparently I’m a really large human being. I don’t even think I’m particularly tall. About 3-5x per year I have someone ask me if I’m a bouncer, if I played in the NFL, or some other such thing suggesting that I’m a large intimidating man. And now that I see these photos, I guess I can begin to understand it.

I still think these photos must be flukes though. The brother-in-law closest to me is, in my mind, almost as big as I am. I think the one just over from him, Ben, is actually taller than I am. Why do I look like the Incredible Hulk? It can’t all be the weight, can it?

I’ll guess I’ll have to lose the weight to find out!

In the mean time, since it might be the funniest movie clip of all time, I present to you ME, starring in The Avengers!

1 May 20171 May 2017

Long Lost Letters

It is my Father-in-law’s (Blake) birthday. His father (Bob) is still a very healthy man at 91 and can be seen bicycling around town still. He also came to the birthday party for his oldest. I love talking to Bob and try to coax some nugget of information from him about his life each time I see him.

Tonight it was about the book he is trying to get finished/printed. He typed up 440 pages (in Microsoft word) worth of letters he and his dear departed sweetheart (Jessie) wrote to each other over the course of their courtship and marriage. I asked him some generic question about it tonight and got an absolute gem of a story.

Bob and Jessie started exchanging letters in 1943, shortly before his service in WWII. Space was a premium in the Navy and all he had was his seaman’s bag. But in the bottom of that pack he kept carried all of Jessie’s letters, never discarding them. He carried them across the US twice, and across the Pacific Ocean and back. He carried them across a lifetime.

Just a few years before she passed, he and Jessie were in their living room. She was confined to a wheel chair by then, but he was up and about straightening up a closet. He pulled from that closet a box that had been pushed into the corner. He opened it up and found a bundle of letters tied together. He untied the string and took the first letter out of the box. He found it dated 1943. It was the first of the letters Jessie had written to him. As she sat, he read it to her, like the voice of the past reaching out to touch them that day.

He had forgotten he had those letters. But he’d kept them safe. When he finished reading, Jessie told him that, “if you look in that closet over there you’ll find all the letters you wrote to me.” He said, “I’ve been in that closet a hundred times, there are no letters there.” But she insisted. So he went and looked. In a briefcase in the top of the closet he found another bundle of letters. Jessie had also kept every letter that Bob had written to her.

He had no idea, and neither did she. He has no idea how they survived that long without being damaged or thrown out. He said he isn’t even sure why he had kept her letters. He had been engaged to a different girl when they started writing and he didn’t keep the letters from that girl. He hadn’t even kept his own mother’s letters. But he’d kept Jessie’s. He’d kept the words of the woman he would eventually marry and love for a lifetime.

And so now that Jessie is gone, he has gone through those letters. He has put them in order and is publishing them as a genealogical record for his posterity to enjoy. I’m very much looking forward to reading it!

However, there was one letter he doesn’t have. There was one particular letter that Jessie wrote that really touched him. He kept it separate from the others so that he could easily find it and reread it. But because it was not safely stored with the others in his seaman’s bag, it was thoughtlessly thrown out one day by someone cleaning ship. He’d kept those other letters for 7 decades, but the one he cherished most was lost??? I wish I could read that one letter most of all…

…but perhaps some things are best kept between couples.