Wherein the Hermit Emerges

[nezumiko]

You may have noticed a complete radio silence on my part since mid-June. I wish I could say that I had been abducted by aliens to fight as their champion in an intergalactic battle on whose fate the very fabric of existence rested. Obviously, if I had, then my return to you now, where you have continued to live with nary a ripple in the space-time continuum, would imply that I was victorious.

Or I suppose it could imply that I failed, but due to some complicated deus ex machina we have spawned into a parallel alternate universe where everything looks exactly the same as it did before, except that cardinals are now red. (Wait, weren't they already red? you ask. That's the beauty of a seamless shift to an alternate universe: no pesky inconsistencies here, no sir!)

In fact what I fell into was more like a tar pit of daily life. All good things, mind you. No, scratch that. Mostly good things and one or two less than good ones, but on balance life is good. Here's a not perfectly chronological overview of the last month and a half.

• I entered into contract to buy the house. That means I gave over an ungodly sum of money as a down payment, then more money for inspectors of various stripes, then filled out reams and reams of paperwork to prove to the bank that I technically didn't need the loan I was asking for (if I was willing to cash in every available and semi-available asset I could lay my hands on), so could they please, pretty please, despite the fact that most of America is trying to default on its loans, go ahead and lend me enough to allow me to buy the house without having to liquidate every last crumb.
  
  
• My good friend Sam had emergency surgery for a ruptured and fragmented disk in his back. I went with him and Anna (his wife) to the hospital, sat with Anna while he had the surgery, then sat with Sam late into the night while Anna went home to nurse the baby. It was looking pretty scary for a while there, but fortunately Sam is recovering, though he still has some nerve damage to contend with.
  
  
• I started testosterone. Low dose, so as to grow my vocal cords slowly. My voice is only just starting to show any effects, but I am now singing tenor in the church choir. Thank heavens a new soprano joined recently so I don't have to feel guilty about it. Also, I now understand why Wayne wanted an "alpha tenor".
  
  
• DK arrived from the UK to become my housemate in my tiny and overcrowded rented house. The promise of moving to the much bigger (nearly twice as big!) new house where he would have his own suite was sufficient incentive to keep him cooperative and docile in the interim.
  
  
• The last weekend in June, DK and I went to San Francisco Pride (his first!), starting with the Trans March on Friday, then Pink Saturday in the Castro, and of course the main event on Sunday. On Sunday we ran into a photographer doing a project documenting the faces of Pride. Here's me, here's DK, and here's the two of us.
  
  
• Inspectors reported alarming things about the house I was trying to buy, like that the main electrical junction box was rusted all to hell and the balcony was sloped poorly and needed a $3500 repair and several other things that the realtor assured me were "minor" by which she meant under $1000 each to fix. Realtors, it seems, have absolutely no concept of multiplication, whereby ten "minor" things that need work adds up to real money, especially to someone who is scraping the barrel to come up with the purchase price in the first place.
  
  
• I got second opinions, decided which minor things could be put off (like, ok, if I don't fix the chimney flue right now we just won't use the fireplace. It's summer, who needs a fireplace?) and signed lots and lots more documents saying I'd accept the house with the various disclosed flaws, except for the ones the state required the sellers to fix, like water heater strapping and smoke and CO detectors and so forth.
  
  
• Phi came to visit for the Fourth of July. We went to fireworks in the fog at Half Moon Bay, which was surreal and sad. You'd see these vague flashes of color in the fog, and then hear the boom, and occasionally some sparkles would drift out of the bottom of the fog bank. But the company was awesome and we had a good time. We also went with JB and her pups to the dog beach in Santa Cruz and then to the beach boardwalk. Very California summer.
  
  
• My rat Toto developed an abscess on his jaw, or possibly in his ear. DK and I took him to the vet, put hot compresses on his ear, gave him antibiotics and pain meds, got him through surgery to open the abscess, flushed the wound with antibiotics, coaxed him to eat, gave him more antibiotics, got him through a second surgery, and had to observe special precautions when the cultures came back showing four different, drug-resistant bacteria, including one that was necrotizing (flesh-eating) and potentially contagious to humans, especially humans like me with compromised immune systems. He took it all like a trooper, continuing to make the happy rat sound and enjoy being petted, but after a month he started dropping weight really fast. When we took him in to put an end to his suffering, the vet cried, too. We'd worked so hard, so diligently, and he was such a sweet rat. She thinks it was probably cancer driving the infection, and that's why we couldn't beat it.
  
  
• Silver lining here: I really like Dr. Stiglich and the Linda Mar Vet Clinic. They're good people, and they treat rats really well. I kind of want to invite her to come over and hang out. I wonder if there are any issues with that, where vets can't be friends with their clients, the way doctors can't be friends with their patients.
  
  
• DK and I scavenged boxes from the 7-11 and Safeway and some friends who moved recently, and packed like mad things in anticipation of my actually getting the loan and closing the sale, but it wasn't real yet. The house was standing vacant, but obviously we couldn't move in until all the money had changed hands, and I just couldn't quite convince myself I was really going to get it.
  
  
• The woman I've been dating and I found ourselves getting more serious about each other. I was trying really hard not to fall for her, because she is non-monogamous and planning to go to grad school in eastern Washington, but the heart wants what the heart wants, I guess. We spent as much time together as we could, which worked out to once or twice a week. She started packing for grad school, and I helped by sharing boxes with her.
  
  
• I had a name changing ceremony at church, and was rebaptized in my new name. My new initials are ZAM. I like this a lot, as I feel it makes me sound like a superhero. I'm using Zach now in most settings, and starting to figure out what I need to do to change my name legally. But I had to wait for the house sale to close, because you just know the bank would have choked to death on something like a name and gender change.
  
  
• The bank decided on some last minute stupidity. They made me close my only credit card, mostly out of spite, I think. They also, when they requisitioned the last two years of my tax returns from the IRS, evidently got told by the IRS that I hadn't filed my taxes. This was nonsense, but it caused several hours of panic while I tried to find the little return receipt stickers from where I'd mailed my taxes in, made frantic calls to my tax accountant, and finally spent a long time on the phone with a Miss Smith of the IRS. She turned out to be a nice person, friendly and patient, who found my "missing" returns and faxed them over to the bank, along with a letter explaining that the IRS did indeed have my taxes. All this for two tax years in which I didn't make enough money to pay taxes anyway.
  
  
• I liquidated a lot of assets (and boy was I relieved the Dow didn't plummet until after I'd completed those transactions) and wire transferred astronomical sums of money from my account to the escrow account. And...
  
  
• I got the keys to my new house!
  
  
• Several awesome friends, including amethyst73 came and helped us pack and move boxes, mostly of books and kitchen things. For someone who doesn't like to cook, I own an insane number of kitchen things. I bought a new bed for the new house - a latex foam mattress that is made of awesome - and DK's room gets my old bed (which was a pretty new, high end box-springs and pillow-top traditional mattress.) I got TV and internet and water and sewer and gas and electric all in my name. A moving van came and moved all my stuff over, and now we live here.
  
  
• The same weekend the moving van came for my stuff, my sweetie's parents came with a U-Haul to drive her to grad school. I met her parents and her younger brother, and didn't scare them too badly. Spent one last night with her, then said a tearful goodbye. Actually I think I managed to hide my tears until I was driving away, but she'll probably read this, and she deserves to know I cried. Manly tears.
  
  
• I hired a friend to paint some of the walls, including my bedroom (pale sky blue), both upstairs bathrooms (honeydew melon green), my office (light violet), the kitchen (darker violet), and the formerly battleship grey entryway (bright aqua and white.) It's amazing what the color does for the place. It's just so much more cheerful and feels so much more like my home.

As it stands now, the kitchen is 80% unpacked and put away, the living room is habitable and comfortable, the bedrooms are messy but usable, and the bathrooms are all fine, except I need to put up the new shower bar in my bathroom so for now I'm showering in the guest bathroom. We need to bolt the bookcases and china cupboard to the walls, and get to work unpacking books. But it's going to be an awesome home. Awesome. DK lives here and is a good housemate. We are finally getting back to having time and energy to write.

And I can hear the ocean from my living room.