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Update on how it's going
3 years ago
General
Figured it's been a while since I've done a journal, so here's an update on how Charlie's doing. It's very much a mixed bag.
First of all, my family has started the process of moving. We're not at the packing stage yet, but we've got a house (potentially) lined up. As a bit of backstory, as I've mentioned in past journals such as this one and this one, my current neighborhood is... bad. And it's gotten even more dangerous lately, to the point where it's actually unsafe for us to come home at night.
To add context to the next few paragraphs, I'd like to establish that currently I live with my parents in a house that we own, and my grandma lives next door to us in a house that she rents. My sister and her now-fiancee live with my grandma.
This prompted most of my family to realize that it's time to move, and we're doing so. Our initial plan was to bring my grandma along with us (she lives right next door), since my sister and her soon-to-be-husband are planning to move out on their own anyway. We found the perfect house: a beautiful four-bed two-bath in a good town about a half hour away, not far enough that anybody would have to change jobs. And as an added bonus, it's right across the street from my best friend of over 20 years.
But.
Upon learning that we were planning to move, my sister became completely hostile. She's grown very used to living for free off of my grandma, and if my grandma were to move with us, she'd be cut off from that. Yes, I know I just said that she was planning to move out anyway -- I know. She immediately started attacking everybody in the family, not physically but verbally. My parents offered to give her the house we're currently in, rent free, so they can continue saving up to get their own place. This wasn't good enough, because she doesn't like the house, and doesn't want to live next door to my grandma, the woman she's currently living with.
Complicating things further is that my grandma, upon seeing the new house, decided she didn't want to move into it. For one, she didn't want to move "too far away" from my uncle, and the second factor was that she doesn't want to give up or even cut back on her smoking, despite knowing that the cigarette smoke bothers the rest of us (it actually makes it difficult for my mother to breathe), and would kill the birds that we own. We asked if she'd be willing to smoke in one room of the house, and that's not good enough. She wants to be able to smoke everywhere.
She doesn't want to move unless it's into a duplex, so she can still have her own space to smoke up all the time. Two issues with this: Mainly that there are simply no duplexes for sale around us that don't already have tenants in them (meaning we'd be buying the property to become their landlords or kick them onto the street, neither of which are things we want to do), and that the VA (whom we're getting the loan to buy the new house from) won't approve us to buy a duplex.
So now grandma decided that she doesn't want to move at all. With this revelation now public, my sister has told all of us that if we move, we're abandoning my grandma and terrible people. This despite the fact that she's already declared that she's moving away, and that she doesn't want to live next door to her. But it's not abandoning her when she moves, of course -- it's her getting on with her life.
At this point you're probably asking, "so why not just move without grandma if she doesn't want to leave?"
The answer to that is that she's incapable of taking care of herself. She suffers from short term memory loss and can't remember conversations from day to day, and lately it's gotten to the point where she forgets to take her medication and shower, because she thinks she already has. She's unable to buy her own groceries and often lies about eating (we do stealth fridge checks), and spends her entire life sitting in her living room, chain smoking and watching Game Show Network. Unless we can talk my uncle into stepping up more and becoming her primary caretaker, since he'll only be 3 minutes away as opposed to our 30+, she has to come with us whether she likes it or not.
So now it's a Catch-22 situation. Option A, move with her and accept the fact that she's going to be an awful housemate who fills the house with smoke, kills our birds (or best case scenario, forces us to rehome them), and camps us out of entire portions of our house while complaining about it all the time. Option B, leave her behind and try to figure out how we can still check in on her regularly enough that she can... well... stay alive.
I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen at this point, and it's actually causing me to lose sleep on a regular basis. At this point, though, we're absolutely going to be buying the new house, and will have to cross the grandma-shaped bridge when we come to it.
And as for my sister... at this point, with everything she's done (especially the stuff I didn't include in this journal), I'm absolutely willing to burn that bridge instead of cross it.
Now let's move on to something a little more positive.
In about a month and a half, my work is changing its hours for the Christmas season, going fully nocturnal and not offering day shifts until January. As mentioned above, my current neighborhood isn't safe at night anymore, so I won't be working during that period at all, no matter what they offer -- no amount of pay is worth coming home and getting shot in my own driveway just because I now live in a gang initiation area.
So, with over a month of "vacation" coming up, I'm going to have a lot of free time... and barring the possibility that we'll be actively in the process of packing things up and moving into a new house during that month, I fully intend on spending the time writing Hotel Paradise. My goal is to get a backlog of chapters again so I can go back to regular weekly posts, instead of the more random "whenever I have time to write a chapter" that I'm doing now.
I also plan, after I'm moved and can set up a proper space for it, to start streaming some games on Twitch. It's something I've been wanting to do for years now, but don't have a good area for it. I already have a room picked out in the new house that would be a perfect streaming den, and I fully intend on setting it up for that purpose.
So, like I said, a mixed bag. Definitely a lot of good and a lot of bad going on for me right now, and it's causing a lot of emotional turmoil. All I can do at this point is hope that in the end, it all turns out okay, and things can get back to some kind of normalcy for me. Or at least something that can be close enough to normal.
First of all, my family has started the process of moving. We're not at the packing stage yet, but we've got a house (potentially) lined up. As a bit of backstory, as I've mentioned in past journals such as this one and this one, my current neighborhood is... bad. And it's gotten even more dangerous lately, to the point where it's actually unsafe for us to come home at night.
To add context to the next few paragraphs, I'd like to establish that currently I live with my parents in a house that we own, and my grandma lives next door to us in a house that she rents. My sister and her now-fiancee live with my grandma.
This prompted most of my family to realize that it's time to move, and we're doing so. Our initial plan was to bring my grandma along with us (she lives right next door), since my sister and her soon-to-be-husband are planning to move out on their own anyway. We found the perfect house: a beautiful four-bed two-bath in a good town about a half hour away, not far enough that anybody would have to change jobs. And as an added bonus, it's right across the street from my best friend of over 20 years.
But.
Upon learning that we were planning to move, my sister became completely hostile. She's grown very used to living for free off of my grandma, and if my grandma were to move with us, she'd be cut off from that. Yes, I know I just said that she was planning to move out anyway -- I know. She immediately started attacking everybody in the family, not physically but verbally. My parents offered to give her the house we're currently in, rent free, so they can continue saving up to get their own place. This wasn't good enough, because she doesn't like the house, and doesn't want to live next door to my grandma, the woman she's currently living with.
Complicating things further is that my grandma, upon seeing the new house, decided she didn't want to move into it. For one, she didn't want to move "too far away" from my uncle, and the second factor was that she doesn't want to give up or even cut back on her smoking, despite knowing that the cigarette smoke bothers the rest of us (it actually makes it difficult for my mother to breathe), and would kill the birds that we own. We asked if she'd be willing to smoke in one room of the house, and that's not good enough. She wants to be able to smoke everywhere.
She doesn't want to move unless it's into a duplex, so she can still have her own space to smoke up all the time. Two issues with this: Mainly that there are simply no duplexes for sale around us that don't already have tenants in them (meaning we'd be buying the property to become their landlords or kick them onto the street, neither of which are things we want to do), and that the VA (whom we're getting the loan to buy the new house from) won't approve us to buy a duplex.
So now grandma decided that she doesn't want to move at all. With this revelation now public, my sister has told all of us that if we move, we're abandoning my grandma and terrible people. This despite the fact that she's already declared that she's moving away, and that she doesn't want to live next door to her. But it's not abandoning her when she moves, of course -- it's her getting on with her life.
At this point you're probably asking, "so why not just move without grandma if she doesn't want to leave?"
The answer to that is that she's incapable of taking care of herself. She suffers from short term memory loss and can't remember conversations from day to day, and lately it's gotten to the point where she forgets to take her medication and shower, because she thinks she already has. She's unable to buy her own groceries and often lies about eating (we do stealth fridge checks), and spends her entire life sitting in her living room, chain smoking and watching Game Show Network. Unless we can talk my uncle into stepping up more and becoming her primary caretaker, since he'll only be 3 minutes away as opposed to our 30+, she has to come with us whether she likes it or not.
So now it's a Catch-22 situation. Option A, move with her and accept the fact that she's going to be an awful housemate who fills the house with smoke, kills our birds (or best case scenario, forces us to rehome them), and camps us out of entire portions of our house while complaining about it all the time. Option B, leave her behind and try to figure out how we can still check in on her regularly enough that she can... well... stay alive.
I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen at this point, and it's actually causing me to lose sleep on a regular basis. At this point, though, we're absolutely going to be buying the new house, and will have to cross the grandma-shaped bridge when we come to it.
And as for my sister... at this point, with everything she's done (especially the stuff I didn't include in this journal), I'm absolutely willing to burn that bridge instead of cross it.
Now let's move on to something a little more positive.
In about a month and a half, my work is changing its hours for the Christmas season, going fully nocturnal and not offering day shifts until January. As mentioned above, my current neighborhood isn't safe at night anymore, so I won't be working during that period at all, no matter what they offer -- no amount of pay is worth coming home and getting shot in my own driveway just because I now live in a gang initiation area.
So, with over a month of "vacation" coming up, I'm going to have a lot of free time... and barring the possibility that we'll be actively in the process of packing things up and moving into a new house during that month, I fully intend on spending the time writing Hotel Paradise. My goal is to get a backlog of chapters again so I can go back to regular weekly posts, instead of the more random "whenever I have time to write a chapter" that I'm doing now.
I also plan, after I'm moved and can set up a proper space for it, to start streaming some games on Twitch. It's something I've been wanting to do for years now, but don't have a good area for it. I already have a room picked out in the new house that would be a perfect streaming den, and I fully intend on setting it up for that purpose.
So, like I said, a mixed bag. Definitely a lot of good and a lot of bad going on for me right now, and it's causing a lot of emotional turmoil. All I can do at this point is hope that in the end, it all turns out okay, and things can get back to some kind of normalcy for me. Or at least something that can be close enough to normal.
