Thursday 14 January 2016

2016 the year the began with death.

I suppose all years begin with someone dying and it's just as a Gen-xer I start to notice it hitting the people I grew up with and admired. Most of the time there is a feeling of sadness and some sense of loss but it moves on replaced by other things in the daily walk forward to my own one day demise.  But this week...well this week has been the shits or as my German friends say echt Scheisse.

On Monday we lost David Bowie, I read the announcement on his FB pace as soon as it was posted actually and like several of my friends, thought it was a horrible hoax because Bowie had just put out a new album and released two singles, I mean if he were ill we'd have heard about it, right? Wrong. So on Monday I spent a huge chunk of time crying and feeling far more sad than I felt I had any right to. It's a strange thing to grieve hard for someone one has never even met or spent time with but still feels a strong connection to. It's made even worse by being empathic and sitting along side millions of other and reading tweet after tweet, post after post about how other people are also sitting and crying and feeling inexplicably sad,  while in between a few people snark about how it's not a big deal and maybe we should just get past it and move on with our lives. Not only did I lose a cultural icon, and actor and singer I really liked but somewhere in between the cracks I think I also lost or maybe it's better to say let go of a friend. Monday was a bad, bad day.

Tuesday I had a grief hangover and the furnace decided to break down. This is a thing that my husband usually takes care of, calling the furnace dudes who I have to say are awesome and getting them to come out to the house and fix the damned thing but we just got a NEW furnace so it breaking down was a bad thing, and as it's new and modern it's all "hey let me flash this message at you..."

there is a problem inside your furnace, please inform your heating dudes. ( I'm paraphrasing)

I posted a picture of it because it's kind of what I do when things go wrong and my brother who channels Douglas Adams sometimes did this with it:


"If I were programming these things it would have said, "Hey, don't want to alarm you (I know this is an alarm) but the water pump just told me that it's sick and while it enjoys pumping water around your house, the cheap bearing the manufacturer used from Ch*** rather than the good one from G******* has failed and in its words "I am no longer able to fulfill my duty. It's been a slice." Oh you should turn of my power so I don't burn out. Sorry it will be cold, love the (expired before my time) pump.""

"Alternatively the msg could come from the device itself... "erm hi there, yo, hey Fiona, yeah it's me, the water pump, you know the bit that helps the furnace heat your home? Yeah the red thingy that goes whirrr most of the time. Look, erm, I'm sorry but I'm not feeling well and can't make it to work today. You're cool with that right? Oh could you call the Dr. for me? I might actually be dying. No, no, nothing serious just a failed gasket, well seized bearing, and I'm overheating so you should probably kill the power. Oh please tell zone valve 5 I love her. tks.""

So I ended up having to do something that terrifies me and that is talk to people in German on the phone about technical stuff and push buttons etc... on the new furnace. After a few minutes we established that the furnace dudes needed to swing by. Which they did.

I like the furnace guy, the in charge one who was the person who oversaw the installation of the new furnace. He also recommended a friend of his to fix our upstairs window. He asked if we had fixed it yet and I told him no oh and your friend never called us.

To which he replied, "That's because he fell off a roof."  ( he lived but he was pretty badly hurt so it will take a while before he is fixing stuff again)

/sigh

Wednesday I went to work. It was a better day at work than most and I got unexpected flowers from co workers because I always bring them sweeties but now we have new work times that involve us getting up at the crack of doom and I was just tired. You'd think being tired would mean sleeping but nope at 3am I was awake and tossing and turning and my brain was doing it's usual "Hey remember that thing you did when you were like 5 and you felt bad about it???"

So it's Thursday a continuation of a theme saw the death of Alan Rickman, also 69 also from Cancer and also a shock.

I'm exhausted and my brain is full of over flowing anxious thoughts that do not stop.

So I will drive them away with a marathon of harry Potter.

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tales from the dark side...