Welcome Back!

Welcome back!  Your property tax bill awaits and it's higher!

Welcome back!  Your car that you were scared to drive on your trip has been deemed 'totally fine' by two mechanics despite wasting three days being jerked around by them.  Also surprise! the dealer left you with an EMPTY TANK to drive home on after it had half a tank going in and it's STILL making that noise!

Welcome back!  Your grandpa died while you were gone and still no one has told you, you found out from a Google search.  Good times.

Boy, life doesn't let ya just ease back into stuff, does it?  

(Toddler: Us  2021:  Granny)

That whole goal to work on my mental health for 2021 has got a few extra weeds in the garden to address.  The crap that sprouted up from not only grandpa's death but the fact no one told me means I'll have to figure out how I want to approach that mentally.  Ultimately, the worst things about my dad and that did the most damage to me are a direct result of the way my grandpa was, how he raised his kids and treated his wife.  To give you an idea of how bad it was where he was concerned, I had to check to see if I was included in the count of grandkids.  Surprisingly, I was.  I've got this book in my cart and will give myself a week or two to sit with things to see if this is something I care enough about to dig into or if I call the cemetery to get his location and yell at a pile of dirt.  I read this book last year (the Mr did too) and while I got good information out of it, neither of us are really happy with the thought of the resolution being "observe them when conversing and manage the conversation.  Think about what is said, how you feel about it and then react to diffuse, if necessary."  Well guess what, I've been doing that for a few years and it's friggin' exhausting.  You have like two seconds to respond to someone before they look at you like "did you hear me?" or "are you having a stroke?"  Doing all of that at once without looking like you're a social idiot is nearly impossible.  How hard is it to have a conversation that doesn't have some snippy undertone or to get an email from the other that doesn't get mad and punish you with silence when you don't bend to their will when safety is involved?  Apparently pretty hard these days.  Not quite the chill way I wanted to start 2021 in our little part of the world.

(tenor.com)

We came home to a clean house which got demolished in 4.3 minutes by bags and crap unloaded from the car so that began to pile on the stress.  I got a good dent into it by Saturday and then just irritated at the state of things Sunday continued on in the morning until it was a few strays I could take care of here and there.  The tree is still up which isn't unusual since we usually have stuff up until the 3rd week in January but the thought of putting it all away isn't top of my list of fun things because then that means I'll need to address the mess of a basement.  I'll need to do that anyway because the washer is starting to show signs of kicking the bucket and that will mean a pathway will need to be cleared.  Not even going to think about that right now.  We bought water alarms to keep us apprised of the situation which only seemed to be a real issue if things got off balance because I plan to run that thing to the ground if I can.

My mom got the Mr a Netflix gift card since we only get it twice a year.  I am amazed people pay for that year round because we can burn through anything good in a week, then it's just scanning their offerings griping about how they don't have anything good, much like all TV these days.  We did watch all of Cobra Kai our first Friday back.  We've been watchers since season one on YouTube and loved it.  I HATED that movie but man, William Zabka is worth watching it alone.  He's friggin' hilarious.  Friday I decided to watch one episode of Bridgerton in the morning...at 7:30pm I was finishing it.  That is some well written, hot aristocratic soft porn!  I loved that Julie Andrews narrated and they revealed Whistledown's identity at the end too because you never know if they will do a season two.  I'm willing to bet with reaching over 64 million viewers in two weeks means highly likely but honestly, they wrapped everything up so I don't see where they would go with it that wouldn't feel like a money grab.  We also got the Showtime app and free trial (or something cheap I think) so we could watch the rest of The Affair series.  I was going to wait until the Dexter revival in the Fall but I can't be sure they'll release all 10 episodes at once.  I was thrilled to see they cast Clancy Brown as the big bad and if ever there was a proper way to wrap it up, it would definitely include Mr Krabs.  (Though I admit, I love him because of his stint as August Corbin on Sleepy Hollow.)  So we've got three-ish seasons of The Affair to keep us busy but I must admit, season two has been a bit of snooze and I don't know if I really care about the characters much anymore.  Plus, given that life imitated art with ol' Dom (Noah) later last year, it almost feels kind of autobiographical now.  It was hard to watch our favorite version of A Christmas Carol with him playing the loveable and charming Fred as I yelled "CHEATER!"  Allegedly.

Now we're on the tail end of the Mr dealing with food poisoning from a place we got takeout from over the weekend.  Very rare it's anything other than that because this place had a maze that your food went through so they didn't even hand it to you and he was masked, Air Tamered and washed his hands when he got home.  It was a Chinese place that I had red flagged in my head from like 10 years ago but I agreed to it when he brought it up a time or two and figured until we had it and could cross it off the list one way or the other, he'd keep bringing it up.  I think it's off the list now.  I'm just glad he's starting to feel better on that front.

I had no illusions the calendar would flip and things would be better but damn if 2021 so far isn't like "you thought 2020 was irritating?  Hold my beer."

How's your 2021 treating you so far?

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