August 2020 Monthly Entry
Late July has been pretty darn hot, but it seems the warm weather in August hasn't been unbearable. We're usually in the mid-20's celcius but the temp drops considerably at night until sunrise. Recently, it has gotten warmer than the average but they will predict it'll be cooler for the rest of the week.
I've made a spontaneous decision to go to Vancouver Island almost two weeks ago and talk about my trip below. [Edit] I've also recently booked a trip to Toronto for Aug.27-30. I plan to visit bear/leather buds and do a little shopping. I'll be staying at the Holiday Inn Toronto Downtown Centre. This may be my last big trip of the year given the current pandemic.
It has been just shy past a year since the accident that resulted in breaking my right humerus. It can be hard to believe both the pain and lack of range of motion I felt that day, and how normal things feel today as if it didn’t happen. Over 8700 hours of healing and I’m about 90% normal. I still need physio as I may still have minor tendonitis left over. There are situations I can feel minor pain in my arm when lying in bed and position it in a certain way - usually an overhead and overreaching range. Getting my arm behind my back is getting better, but it is not 100% when I pull it towards the left side and lift it. With all that said, it’ll still be a long while before my arm will be completely normal, but the vast majority of healing had happened since a year ago.
Thanks to a bunch of extra help, I managed to complete almost all of Montecito shortly after my last month's entry. There was still the one classroom on the main floor that I couldn't touch, as the retiring teacher still wasn't done! I was sent back to the school late last month to begin wiping down things after she finally said adiós to her teaching days. After my vacation week, I returned on Aug.10 to find everything done - floor scrubbed and waxed too! Caesar, my co-worker and the guy who also worked as a janitor at SFU like me 14 years ago, was with me for the day. We only had to put the furniture back and we didn't do much else. The next day, I did some touching up and even swept the boiler room. I had Wednesday off (the reason why below) but Thursday I had to return to Lyndhurst to help do a quick scrub on a newly installed floor downstairs in one of the two daycare rooms (they ripped out all the old carpet), wipe down a lot of their crap, and return the furniture we moved out late last month. Friday, I spent the day at Burnaby Mountain -back 367 days since I was there last when I had my accident- wiping down the staff rooms on each floor and thoroughly vacuuming them. This week I'm at Byrne Creek and Aug.19 to Sept.1 I'll be using the rest of my vacation days.
Nearly a couple weeks ago, I transferred from my BlackBerry PRIV to a Samsung Galaxy A70. I bought the phone from Best Buy Canada online in December and it arrived Christmas Eve. I had my "Leatherdaddy George Ash" custom case made for it and got screen protectors. Bell, my provider, wasn't offering much in the BlackBerry department to upgrade my phone with so I decided to look at other Android-based devices. This was a good decision as BlackBerry has exited the smartphone market not long ago. I still wanted to get some use out of my PRIV, but the battery loses it charge too fast and updating the Google app weekly was a bad pain in the ass (80% of the time it would restart the phone and the update wouldn't stick) that I finally decided to pull out the Samsung A70. I first applied the screen protector, though it is slightly off, and clipped on the "Leatherdaddy" custom case. Beautiful! I copied and backed up my data on the PRIV first. I then took out and transferred my SIM card to the new phone, and put in a brand new 128GB microSD card that I got off Best Buy during Boxing Week 2017. The phone uses USB-C but the charger cord is too short and noticed both ends were USB-C, meaning I couldn't connect it to my PC and transfer files. I immediately purchased one on Amazon and paid for fast shipping so I could get the transfers done before my upcoming trip. The phone was charged and I powered it on. I went through the steps to set up my accounts and have the phone download what was in my Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive clouds. I quickly found out that to use any of my past BlackBerry apps, the BlackBerry Hub+ app had to be installed first. I tolerated this but found that BlackBerry would soon want people to pay for the use of their apps or use a subscription model - I don't remember what it was, but it meant I couldn't use their apps anymore. One major problem was my contacts, not every one of them transferred because they were some still linked to my PRIV. I could still access them on my previous phone but it means having to quickly go through the list on that phone and updating information on the A70. Anyways, virtually all apps from my PRIV were installed onto the new phone. I deleted a number of them as there was no point of having them anymore. I logged into a number of accounts so the information can be saved for quicker access, especially airline and travel apps. WhatsApp and Telegram transferred without incident plus my SMS messages too! The phone itself isn't that hard to use but still takes some getting used to. Once I got my USB 3.0 to USB-C cord, I transferred all my mp3 files, select past to current photos, and select bear pics and porn from my collection to the microSD. It took around half its memory and a few hours to transfer the data but there is still plenty of memory left for future photos and videos. The phone runs very nicely and the battery life is great! I hope this phone will serve well for the next 2 or 3 years to come!
August 6 I took a trip to Vancouver Island by myself. That morning, my father helped put around 7 boxes of my late-Daddy David's Judaic books that were collecting dust in his shed for over 4 years into my car. My friend Ben consented for me to take them over to him. This was about half the amount of books so it'll mean a second trip in the future or if Ben happens to be on the Mainland, then he can fill his car with them. After packing my luggage, I said goodbye to my folks and drove to Horseshoe Bay in Tsawwassen for the ferry to Victoria. Throughout my trip, I was blasting mostly 60's to 90's tunes from my new phone using the same auxiliary cable I used with my previous phone. I had a reservation so I arrived just before 10am and was on the ferry for the 11am departure. It rained briefly beforehand and found that it stained my car a bit, likely as the rain probably contained salt as we were by the ocean. I say this as I cleaned my car the previous day: washed, vacuumed, and waxed it with my father's help. Grrrr... I didn't do much on the ferry and trying to find a seat wasn't easy at first given social distancing rules. I didn't buy anything to eat as I would wait until I was on the Island later. We arrived on the Island around 12:30pm and I drove south to Victoria during the nice, sunny weather. I was going to stay at the Arbutus Inn but finding it was a little tricky. Thankfully they had outside parking so check-in was easy. My room was already clean so I could go in immediately. My room down on the first floor was okay and clean. My car was just outside my window, funny enough. Ben was finishing up a blood work appointment and we agreed to meet at the nearby Ricky's for a late-lunch. We did so and we both had the same thing: a French Dip with au jus. While Ben chose to have it with sauteed mushrooms, I had it Philly style with peppers. We chatted about ourselves and his family mostly, but we had a pleasant time. He joined me back outside the Inn to give him the boxes of books. We continued chatting outside for the next couple of hours about David, religion, etc. We said goodbye and I returned to my room. I was hoping to get a message from Biker Daddy Paul for meeting up for a possible play session but alas, I got no reply. I was eventually getting thirsty and looked on Google Maps for the nearest 7-Eleven, which was around a kilometer away southeast on Bay Street. I walked over and got myself a couple of bottles of water, including one for my CPAP machine (I foolishly didn't bring from home my jug of distilled water). On the way back, I got a cookie blizzard from a Dairy Queen on Douglas Street. Of course, carrying a couple of bottles of water in a paper bag and a medium-sized blizzard wasn't all that fun. It was getting toward sunset and I spent the rest of the night in my hotel room. I felt tired and a little nauseated. There was still no reply from Daddy Paul and he hadn't opened my message on Recon yet. I watched some YouTube videos and went to bed about 1am.
I had some difficulty sleeping at first but managed to get a few hours in. I got out of bed sometime after 9am. Before I checked out, Daddy Paul finally got back to me on Recon and said he wasn't going to be playing with anyone else -outside of his husband- due to the pandemic, and wished me a good trip. I replied thanking him for getting back to me and we can try again when things get better. With all that, I checked out and decided to drive all the way up to Lazo/Comox. It got cloudy the further north I went. It took around 110km and near an hour and a half to reach Nanaimo from the Arbutus Inn. I decided to finally get something to eat that early afternoon so I stopped at a McDonald's on Nicol Street to pick up a Seriously Chicken BLT sandwich meal and 10-piece nuggets. I drove north to the nearby Casino Nanaimo, which had a small shopping centre, so I could park and eat my meal. I went outside to throw away the remaining garbage and just walk around a bit. I think by about 1pm, I continued north to Courtenay, which was another 110km, to go meet Daddy Lewis at his workplace before closing at 3pm. I parked my car nearby and walked to his workplace on Cliffe Avenue. He shut the place down so we wouldn't be disturbed and went to the back section so we could make some hot bear-love. After over half-hour of play, we spent some naked time together chatting away until we got dressed sometime around 4pm. I needed a washroom break and after I was done, said goodbye to Daddy Lewis. I then drove another 9km to Lazo to spend the night at my friend's place, Marc. This was the first time I got to see his 3 and a half-year old son, Payden plus -much to my surprise- his immigrant Russian wife, Sasha. I either forgot he married or didn't know. She is not the biological mother of his child. Marc's ex has, I believe, shared custody with Payden. It's a subject I should talk to him about someday. Sasha seems nice and her English is pretty good though she can have difficulty understanding what I say as I can talk too fast. I think she's in her mid-20's as she doesn't seem to care too much for the things Marc and I grew up with in our generation. Marc got me to first play The Last of Us Part II and after awhile, we started to watch the 1989 Batman film through Sasha's laptop connected to the TV and through some free movie site. Constant interruptions from the website didn't help and Sasha did not understand why Marc and I loved the film so much. He tried explaining the appeal but she still couldn't understand given how "fake" it was. During the movie, we had these great chicken & onion kabobs for dinner. I forget the reason, but we decided to stop watching the film about a third through (just after the Joker reveals himself and kills crime-boss Grissom) and watch some YouTube videos instead, especially on a couple of NES games that Marc owned since childhood. Payden was put to bed I think around 8pm. Both Marc and Sasha went to bed sometime soon after and I was by myself in the living room. During this time, I was looking at my options of reserving for my ferry ride home the next day or Sunday. I had to choose the last ferry at Duke Point the next day if I was going to get home as all other reservations were full. Sometime around 10 or 11pm, I hear shouting upstairs from their bedroom. It sounded like it was a domestic abuse incident as Sasha was constantly yelling "Fuck you" and Marc getting her to leave the bedroom because of something she did! I had no idea what was going on - at first I thought it was a joke but it didn't take long to see that it was serious. Sasha came down to the living room, crying her eyes out. She soon asked if I could take her away in the morning and I said yes. She was considering leaving and going back to Russia. Marc soon called me and said he would explain what happened in the morning but if Sasha needed anything, it was okay with him if I wanted to help. Before hanging up, he reminded me to wake him up at 9:30am. As Sasha was continuing to cry, I went to my car and got out my luggage so I could set my stuff up in the spare room. I'm sure the room was used to change Payden's diapers as it smelled! It wasn't dirty, but the smell did linger around! I looked up if there were any women's shelters around Comox and I don't think Google Maps had shown any. The nearest was all the way down in Nanaimo. My worry was that I was going to drive over an hour each way there and back! But I went to bed around 1am as there was nothing more I could do. Thankfully, I think Payden was fast asleep while the whole incident was going on!
I got up on Saturday around a sunny 9am and noticed Sasha wasn't around. Did she leave in the morning? Is she elsewhere around the house? At 9:30am, I went upstairs to wake Marc and lo and behold, Sasha opens the door - as if nothing happened. Marc was up and thanked me for waking him. WTF is going on here? Soon after while I was in the living room, Marc comes and talks to me about what happened. According to him, Sasha got physical with him all of a sudden in bed, actually hitting him hard in the face. By the fourth or fifth hit, he wasn't having anymore of it and reacted by slapping her when he told her to stop. That was what set her off. He made it clear that my presence wasn't to blame but that this has not happened before. I didn't know what to think. While Marc didn't have much of his face or body that I could see, Sasha had nothing on hers. I don't doubt Marc's story but I'm hoping this is not some kind of abuse situation given I don't know if Sasha has problems and/or Marc is taking advantage of her being an immigrant and can assert dominance through threat of deportation. At least, I didn't have to take her to Nanaimo that morning. I soon after spent some time with Payden, playing "beaming each other with a stuffed panda" and with some of his action and dinosaur figures - a few I remembered that came from Marc's collection when we were kids. I had my shower though Payden kept coming in and I was doing my best to make sure he didn't see me naked. After I dressed, Sasha and I let him watch some Netflix shows but it was boring me a bit. By early afternoon, I think Sasha was downstairs in the basement while Marc got some fried chicken and huge taters for a late lunch. I don't think they were much together in the same room during my final hours visiting them. In fact, I don't think she ate anything he brought home. Was it from the residue of last night? Probably. We watched stand-up comic Bill Burr do a special on Netflix before I had to get ready to leave. My older brother back down in Nanaimo said earlier in the day to meet at his place by 6pm. By 4pm, I started putting my luggage into the car and just prepping things up. I said goodbye to Marc first, and then hugged and said goodbye to Payden, and finally said goodbye to Sasha. I left their place around 4:30pm. Given the incident, I wish I didn't feel good about leaving. Also wishing that it didn't happen and I could stay another night. But I had to feel glad leaving, hoping things will resolve itself and the next time I visit, won't end up the way it did. On the way west and south, I haven't filled up on gas the entire time I've been on the Island, but I was getting toward empty so I detoured off to Parksville and went to a Husky Gas-N-Go station on Island Highway. After filling up my car, I bought a bottle of Sprite lemonade flavour, and a couple bottles of water from the store. I let my brother know I would be a little late given the detour and he replied that it was fine. I continued south and reached his home near Planta Park, arriving about 6:15pm.
My brother was already outside and after some initial greetings, motioned for me to follow him to the backyard where the rest of the family was waiting. Much to my surprise, he had a beard - though better trimmed and not as long as mine. He was surprised by my beard too. I met the rest of the family: my sister-in-law looks a little older but about the same, my niece looks closer to her mother, and my nephew looks closer to his father. My niece remembered me when she was very young but my nephew was only a 1-year old the last time I saw him. We had pizza, which was very nice of them. Our first talk was an update about our families. My sister-in-law's parents sold their Greek restaurant around a few years ago and retired. Even better, the timing was just right as the new owners -who turned it into an East Indian cuisine restaurant- would later be forced to sell it as the area was being turned into condos/apartments. They spend a couple of months in Greece every year but obviously, can't go this year. I don't think much has changed with both my brother and sister-in-law, they are still in their jobs though my brother had to take a Master's program to keep himself relevant at his job due to younger upstarts possibly threatening it. As for the kids, they are doing well in school and have been taking French Immersion programs. My niece will be starting high school in September and I think my nephew will be in 6th grade. As for my side of the family, I said our father had retired in 2014 and that both folks were doing okay. Older sister is still working at the same place but brother-in-law is now on daily dialysis and probably cannot work again. Younger sister is now a pharmacist, her husband is getting promoted at his job, and my niece is starting 9th grade. As for family background on our father's side, my father is still power of attorney for his sister but doesn't much talk to her anymore. Nothing has changed with our father's two other siblings in 10 years. On mom's side, a lot of discussion was based more upon her mother - both before and after her passing. Some of it I mentioned in my grandmother's entry. I talked about grandma's funeral, the current status with our aunts and uncles, our cousin's death, and even my mom's youngest brother, uncle Roger. My brother interjected that in all the years he has lived in Nanaimo, he has never once ran into our uncle - and they live in the same city! Once we were updated on family matters, we chatted about politics and religious matters. For about the next hour and a half, my brother and I had "the talk" - the talk that was 20 years in the waiting. I could tell my brother knew this would happen so he went first and said along the lines of, "Steve, I know that you're gay and while at first it was hard to accept, I care more about the kind of person you are and can accept it." I nearly teared up! Now of course, my brother is religious so obviously the gay-sex-is-a-sin position is to be had, but it didn't matter to me. From then on, I talked about my growing up knowing I was gay, when mom & dad found out in my late-teen years, when I discovered about the bear subculture, when my brother found out the hard way, going through conversion therapy, constant fights with mom and sometimes dad, first steps within Vancouver's gay community, when Daddy David was on "KinK" and the incident in which I soon after got kicked out of the house, first Pride weekend, why I moved in with David & Kevin at the end of 2001... so many things to talk about that my brother had no idea what was going on in the background and what I was doing in my life all those years ago. I talked about David, but there wasn't much time. A couple of things to mention is that my brother knew of David because of the KinK TV show, he happened to be channel surfing back in 2001 and recognized a western store in Cloverdale (I added to him in that same scene, it was how I also knew the first season took place in Vancouver!), plus my brother admitted that he had seen the 1980 Al Pacino film, Cruising in the past! Wow! There was a lot to talk about but it was getting past 9pm and I had to get to my ferry ride for home. We went inside the foyer of their house so I could use the washroom and say goodbye. We couldn't hug because of the whole pandemic, but I thanked them for supper and the long chat. I then drove all the way to Duke Point and waited for the 10:46pm ferry back to Tsawwassen. I spent the ride back texting Kevin in Fresno and Daddy Jeff in Alton, IL. It was Daddy Jeff's birthday that day so we talked about it besides about the meeting with my brother. Kevin asked if this was the same brother who got married the same weekend he and I met for the first time in 2002 and I said yes. It gave a little context to our conversation. I arrived back on the Mainland and drove home, arriving sometime after 1am. I felt like I accomplished a lot in a few short days and will likely come back to do it all again next summer.
Last Tuesday my father had to go in for a colonoscopy. I drove him to Richmond Hospital in the morning and then drove to my shift after dropping him off. After his procedure, he called my mom and let her know he was okay. She then called me at work to let me know the news. I took the next day off so I could pick my father up and take him home safely. I played some music from my phone -continued from where it left off during my trip- which kept him happy on the way home. The way I saw it, since he did the same thing for me last year with my broken arm, I should return the favour to him. I have to fix something with my taking the day off from work, but I'm sure it can be rectified with payroll.
I haven't been playing The World Ends with You much but I think I'm almost finished the main game. I also haven't started Star Trek: Enterprise yet but will soon. It hasn't been that productive of a summer but I'll see what I can do with some of my upcoming free time.
Last Movie: Avengers: Endgame (Theatrical), Alita: Battle Angel (Blu-Ray)
Last Book: The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics - The Screwtape Letters
Last Game: Sega Vintage Collection: Monster World (Xbox 360 - XBLA)
Current Book: The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics - Miracles
Current Games: Lost in Shadow (Wii) & The World Ends with You (DS)