Dentist, CWAC and Wiring

Today started early! That alarm at 6:30am was not welcome at all. For a day crammed with dentist, wiring, and a pitbull, I would have preferred more sleep. I’m firmly of the opinion that the world shouldn’t exist at that time. Alas…

Dentist

The reason for the early morning was Joshua’s 8am dentist appointment for a temporary crown. This was compounded by the fact that the dentist is in Riverton, a 30 or so minute drive from Pleasant Grove.

Leaving the rest of the family home, Julie, Joshua, and I left at 7am for my parents place in Bluffdale. There Julie and Joshua jumped into my parents car and headed to the appointment. This was fine with my parents as they sleep late into the day (we often wake them up well after 10am to start working.)

Josh received his temporary crown and has an appointment for the permanent one in a few weeks. The temp one though was given with instructions to not eat any apples… poor kid might starve!

Errands

I left as soon as I dropped them off in Bluffdale and headed toward SLC. I must have been ahead of the worst of traffic because I made it with a lot of time to spare before my group session. So I ran quite a few errands.

First stop was Home Depot to get the supplies that we needed to complete a handful of tasks. This included the can lights so we can finish the wiring, and a few odd plumbing pieces.

Next was the bank. Their drive up window says it is open at 8:30 and I pulled in at precisely that time. A woman was there who explained she got stuck in traffic and would need a 10 minutes or so to get up and running. I took the time to fill up on gas across the street. After cashing few checks I was off to the VA.

Dental Issues Again

With still 90 minutes until my session I was off to enrollment. I had a few days prior called to schedule an appointment with VA Dental clinic but they declined to make me an appointment, saying I wasn’t eligible. This was surprising to me because I was receiving dental care in Little Rock.

So I needed to visit enrollment to clarify my eligibility. The guy at enrollment was awesome. As soon as I explained what I needed he looked me up and sighed. “Yes, you are clearly eligible. Who did you talk to over there? Man or woman” I told him a guy. “*sigh That’d be the guy you just moved from here over to that office. I’ll get it straightened out.” So he made a phone call (rather than making me do it) and politely corrected the person who answered that, yes, I did qualify for dental coverage, and made the appointment for me next week.

Good service from the VA? I’m amazed! Kudos to Jacob at the SLC VA Enrollment office! You were great!!

With those miscellaneous errands done I was off to my group session.

Wiring

Because I was able to complete all of my errands before group, I had about 2.5 hours to kill before my CWAC meeting. So I cruised back down to Bluffdale and helped Julie and Joshua who were expertly handling the wiring in the bedrooms.

They had it handled, but it moved faster with me there. I have this magic ability to save time be being able to reach things in high places without moving around ladders or chairs. Go me! I also dropped of the cans that I had picked up earlier. After I left with Josh to go to CWAC Julie was able to get some of those installed and wired as well.

If we get this house done by our “deadline” it will be entirely thanks to Julie’s hard work and skill.

Canines With A Cause

Today was my first CWAC meeting with dogs present. Because I don’t have one of my own I was handling one of their dogs in training. Today I was paired with Piper, a female black Pitbull who was a great joy to work with.

At this stage the meetings are NOT about training the dogs nearly as much as they are about training US, the handlers, how to deal with them. We used clickers and chunks of hot dogs as treats to learn how to shape the animals behavior.

Just being around the dog helped my feel better. It filled the void of losing Chief, my Great Pyrenees we had in MO. I’ll be working with a different dog next week, but I don’t mind. I’m just happy to be around one at all. My mother in law absolutely won’t allow me to have one here at her house, so I can’t get one until we’ve moved anyway. So I’ll gladly take what I can get now and anxiously look forward to moving and getting a dog of my own.

When that was done Josh and I jumped back into the van, picked up Julie, and headed home. It was a hot and tiring day, with far too many miles, but it was productive. Josh saw a dentist. My meetings went well. I have an appointment with a dentist. Julie got a lot of wiring done. Dad was able to get a lot of the plumbing done. The sheet rocker visited and got us in his schedule. Hopefully we can string a lot of these type days together … minus the heat!

24 June 201724 June 2017

Making Progress… Slowly

It took a little over a month, but we are finally making progress on the house “remodel” effort.

ENDLESS CLEANING

Most of our first few weeks were simply spent on cleaning out he space to be “remodeled.” I keep putting that in quotes because it is only partly accurate. We aren’t technically remodeling the house, we are actually finishing it. The space we are primarily focused on has never been completed.

For years it has served primarily as a storage room. Things put into there were neglected and forgotten. I’ve found countless items I had forgotten I owned, and so have my parents. I’ve posted several humorous lists about it that you can read here, here, and here.

Here’s a quick glimpse into what this room was when we started.

As you can see, there was a LOT of stuff to go through. Much of it went into the trailer and was hauled off to the landfill. Some of the items were good and useful and were moved to a different location in the house. And some of it is needed to finish this space. But first it was the cleaning, and it took us a seemingly endless period of time.

I may or not have noticed in the video, but there were open access points directly to the outside. These allowed birds to almost freely come and go from this room. This meant that along with dust, we were also cleaning a fair amount of birds nests and feces along with our own possessions. For the first month we did nothing but cleaning/organizing. But as I say, it finally feels like we are really making progress.

MAKING PROGRESS

Insulation

This space is a bit over 1200 square feet. In the end it will turn into 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1 full kitchen, a laundry room, and a living room (which will likely be filled with that pool table you saw).

A big portion of our cleaning was dealing with those big piles of insulation blocks. This room is over the garage and needs insulation from that space, and those blocks were always intended for that purpose. Because the space was never finished, the floor boards were never screwed down and were easy to lift up. So up they came, and that block insulation went down below it.

This week we were also able to get additional fiberglass insulation blown in on top of those blocks. This was done to fill in gaps left by the block insulation and to provide the appropriate R-value. We were able to do this ourselves and was a fairly easy process.

Plumbing

The plumbing for a kitchen was already in place, but we needed to add plumbing for the bathroom and wash room. We started that last week and are almost done. A good competent professional would probably have been done in about 5 hours, but we’re all either old (Dad), broken (myself) or in need of direction (Julie/kids).

As an aside, Julie has repeatedly proven herself as the best worker amongst us. She doesn’t always know what to do, but she is the most capable one to do it. She has definitely been held back by Dad and I because we can’t keep up with her. Absolutely completely awesome!

One of the challenges slowing us down is the fact that we need to get the plumbing done before we put the floor down, and we need the floor down to build walls, but it is nice to have walls built before you do the plumbing. We’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the best order to do things in, and another longer amount of time going back and forth to Home Depot for supplies.

But we’re making progress. We have the rough plumbing done except for vents that need to go through the walls. For water supply, we only need to connect to the house water lines AND pray that where we brought the supply through the floor is in the right locations.

Main trunk of rough plumbing — The main trunk of the waste lines made from ABS, before insulation was blown in

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will hopefully be making progress again. We think that on Monday the HVAC guys will be there to install the gas line for the furnace and to the oven in the kitchen. When they are done we can start building the interior walls. We’ve bought the electrical wire to run from the meter to a separate breaker box in this space. And if all of that gets done we’ll start running the individual electrical lines for outlets and lights.

I won’t hold my breath for all of that getting done next week. We are painfully slow. A competent craftsmen could build the walls in half a day. I think it’ll take us three at least. Dad used to be more than competent, but 70 is just around the corner for him. I’m young enough, but just unable to do more than about 30-60 minutes of real work a day (broken into 5-10 minutes segments).

So keep watching and I’ll give you more pics and fun stories about what we’ve got going on. If you notice the countdown timer at the bottom of the page we are now under 2 months before school starts, so any day we aren’t making progress is a day driving me nuts.

21 June 201720 June 2017

What Is That? – Part III

“What is that?” is the most common question the kids have asked while cleaning? This is the third installment. You can read the first two here and here.

This week we got a terrifying glimpse into the garage. We also continue to find gems in the basement and ‘Great Room.’

What Is That?

The answers so far include:

a car wash coupon with no expiration date, but no indication for which car wash 🙁

7-10 empty paint cans

MORE Christmas lights!

Some sort of specialized router table

Noah’s Ark

a 6th Nativity set

a picture of the original Gerber baby

every paper to every house my parents have ever built (seriously!)

a quilt given to my parents as a wedding gift

a 1960’s (?) stove top oven

the Scepter of Dagobert

a glass door shot out by a neighbor kid with a BB gun

a filing cabinet full of work contracts

3 sets of jumper cables

a never-assembled children’s rocking chair

a Princess Leia action figure

the RMS Republic and the Tsar’s Treasure

a Chewbacca action figure inside of a Star Wars star fighter

a twirling baton

a 1990’s expired fishing license

enough weather liner (for doors or windows) to circle the globe

3 lawnmower carburetors

4 refrigerators

the Florentine Diamond

a pellet gun

life jackets from before there was life

a broken wooden oar

the REAL source location for the Spiders of Mirkwood

and finally….

the pool table my parents bought me when I was 15 – a gift to shut me up! (For two years anytime I was asked “what do you want?” the answer was a “pool table.” Eventually the persistence paid off.)

Stay tuned for next week, which will hopefully be a video/picture version of “What is that?”

13 June 2017

Mental Health Crisis

While I had an absolute blast on Saturday at the Elders Quorum social shootout, it wasn’t all roses and might have started me on the path toward a mental health crisis.

Dealing with Mental Health Issues

While I have several firearms, and feel like I am quite proficient in their use, I don’t actually use them all that often. Last weekend was the first time in 2017. I think I only had them out once in all of 2016.

I’ve even stopped carrying my sidearm. I still have my carry permit, fully support carrying, and think it is largely a smart thing to do. But while I think having one is a good idea for most people, unfortunately I think it might be more dangerous for myself to have one. Maybe as my treatments at the VA continue this will improve.

I was slightly nervous about the shootout on Saturday, but mostly that was nervousness about other people’s safe handling of the weapons. And everything at the event was fine. I felt good. But later, after returning home, I started not doing so well.

Mental Health Crisis

I don’t know even if it is directly relatable to the shootout. I was slightly depressed all afternoon afterwards though. And when I get depressed I want to snack as a way to distract myself. About 10pm I headed to the store to pick up a bag of chips. I had the windows down as I drove to feel the cool night air.

There is a Maverick gas station on the corner of state street and 300 East in Pleasant Grove. As I went through that intersection a man I didn’t see yelled to someone else, “Hey, will you…(something). ” I can’t identify why, probably the inflection in his voice similar to somebody else I knew, but something about that sentence had me back at Fort Huachuca in an instant.

As I rounded the corner of that intersection, only a fraction of a second after hearing the words, I was already in a panic. I was shaking and terrified. Immediately I pulled over into the Smith’s parking near the same corner. I spent 20 minutes there just trying to breath; to relax; to convince myself that I WAS safe. It was as long a 20 minutes as I’ve had in quite a while.

I texted Julie, only telling her that I wish she had come because I was feeling “some anxiety.” I had thought about telling her to grab Blake (her father) and coming to pick me up. I was in really bad shape, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to reveal to Blake/Joan how bad I was doing. (Yes, I see the irony of that decision and then sharing it here on the blog.)

Ongoing Issues

The only reason I relate this to the shooting at all is that during the episode I kept hearing the gunshots ringing in my ears. They’re probably unrelated.

I eventually convinced myself I WAS safe and calmed down. I made it home just fine. That was Saturday night. Sunday was… difficult. No full blown meltdown at church like I’ve done before, but periods of it were difficult to get through.

Monday was… fine. Julie has spent several days trying to coax me to talk. But I don’t know what to say to her. She can tell I haven’t been well. Nightmares, as expected, have been worse than normal.

Today, Tuesday, wasn’t a great day either. This morning, still on edge and dealing poorly with the stress, I got a phone call from the insurance which didn’t help (I’ll write more about that in another post). That was while on the way to my parents to do some work again today.

No work took place though. While discussing what needed to be done my Dad made some fairly benign comments directed at me that set me off. I didn’t want to blow up so I just left. I stood, said I couldn’t handle it today, and left. Julie tried to stop me saying Dad was just joking. I said I was leaving and if she wanted a ride home she better get in the car too. A few minutes later we were on the road back home.

Family is great… but everyone needs a friend!

So here I sit feeling like a grade A loser unable to control his emotions. I feel like I’m just barely hanging on. I wish desperately I had a friend to call. The one and only good friend I feel like I’ve had since my discharge is now way back in Missouri, possibly never to be seen again. A while back he suggested I get out there and meet people, saying I’m a great guy and will find friends.

Despite feeling like I’ve tried doing that, it hasn’t happened yet. Everybody else at my stage in life seems to already be set in stone with work, schedules, friends, family. Nobody has time/room in their life for a needy, broken vet. I can’t blame them. I wouldn’t really want to hang out with a depressing mental case either.

I’m desperately missing Joshua, who is at Scout Camp this week. With him here I could find a reason to get out of the house at least and go help him practice some basketball or golf.

Don’t panic… I know I’m loved.

I know Julie loves me, and so do the kids. And my parents. I know that. I know I can talk to them (despite what happened with my Dad today). I’m sure I could probably reach a church leader or two. I know there are people to talk with, even if it is only because of their calling, but I wish I had even one good friend as well who I could call up and get together with.

And I wish I could stop all this damn crying!

12 May 20178 May 2017

50 Years!

May 12, 1967

That is the date my parents were married. They celebrate 50 years of marriage today. Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad! I love you both!