And continued fallout from insanity yesterday

Everyone was gone pretty much all day today, so things were quiet.  The landlord texted me this evening to ask about what happened, and I told him that Josh pretty much just flipped out on Larry because he wanted him to move his car so he could mow the lawn.  I also mentioned the aftermath with the BB gun out the back window.  

"Classy," says the landlord.

He then tells me that Josh's mother, Wendi, is dealing with the crap with Larry.  I told Kevin I'd mention the BB gun thing to Wendi as well, and Kevin said that would be a good idea.

Wendi and I...well, I've blogged about her before.  See here for an example.  She's nuts.  Certifiably.  More importantly, she really hasn't lived here for the better part of a year.  Which has been good.  But I REALLY don't want to talk to her.

But I have to.  This can't pass.  So I text her about the BB gun.  I tell her it happened, and that "I choose to assume he couldn't see me and it wasn't intentional."

Text comes back.  "I just asked him.  It wasn't the BB gun, it was his paintball gun.  And he didn't see you - he would NEVER shoot at someone maliciously."

Immediate text follow-up: "I would like to know what happened to the outside toys, kitchen stuff that I had for the kids went.  I was told they are gone.  I would have liked to know what was going on so there wasn't an issue."

Oh I am SO not getting thrown under the bus for this one.  I asked Josh about them.  He said pitch them.  I told her as much.

"I would never throw anything out without checking with him first."

Response back: "It's all good.  Just was curious."

And on top of that, the trash can in the hallway is now CRAWLING with maggots from whatever he dumped in it (I'll spare you the pic for that one), and there is another bag of trash in the driveway.

Seriously.  Just happened like a half hour ago.  

So what it comes down to is that I need an exit plan.  As much work as I've put in to the back yard, as much as I'm going to do this summer...it's a rental.  I don't own it.  I have no serious stake in it, from that perspective.  And if I have no plans to buy it (and I know the landlord clearly has no plans to evict them), then I need a solid plan to get out of here.

In the meantime, however, I will work on compiling the stories.

I love the smell of BB's in the morning...smells like....

Growing up, and as a fully functional adult, one of the things I hate most of all is mowing the lawn.  Always hated it.  Waste of time, never looked right, drove me nuts.  Rider/push/old-school-spinny-blades-of-death - didn't matter.  So one of the things that I love about this place is that someone else mows the lawn.

Larry mows the lawn here (and for Kevin's other properties), and I try to do my best to clean things up when Larry gets here.  He beat me to the hose, but I cleared up the stuff down by the patio, the new clothesline, and eventually shuffled bikes.  Let me explain about the bikes.

One of the projects I'm doing is fixing the wall in the back.  (Other post about that later.)  One of the great challenges of that has been keeping the area clean, since Josh (my "teenager" downstairs neighbor, now 20) keeps dumping his crap in that back corner.  (Occasionally it's actual household trash, which is just foul, since he has a baby in diapers.)  I cleared out five bags of trash (after asking, and he declared it was trash - most of it this time was a kids plastic kitchen set that he'd left outside for the winter), and I piled the bikes over by the side of the house.  All eight of them in various states of repair.

So while Larry is mowing the lawn, I shuffled the bikes into a pile in the front yard, so he can mow the side yard.  I'm figuring that either Josh will move them back, or they'll just stay in the front yard.  No idea either way, and really not that worried.  

Josh's car is also parked in the front yard, and Larry goes to knock on the door to get Josh to move it so he can mow.  His wife answers, and says she's go get him up.  (It's 1:30 in the afternoon.  Just for the record.)

Larry points at the car.  "This isn't the driveway, ya know.  It's the yard.  Where the grass is and shit."  She nods, and goes inside.

So Josh comes out, and what I hear in the hallway is "I am not moving my fucking car!  And he can just put all those bikes back where they fucking were!"

He storms out and leans against the car, getting on the phone with someone (I'm assuming Wendy, his mother), and shouting into it.  "He's getting all up in my FACE!  Like I fucking need to jump when he says move the fucking car!  I'm not fucking doing it!"

The oldest daughter (she's five) comes out for a quick moment, then runs back in the house screaming from Josh yelling into the phone.

Larry is grumbling and shaking his head, "Well, if I have to put up with this shit I just won't mow the goddamn lawn here."  He shouts over at Josh when Josh starts ranting into the phone about the bikes in a pile, "I didn't even MOVE those goddamn fucking bikes!"

I decide this is the best time to go to Home Depot and get the concrete that I need to work on the back wall.  So I split quickly for Batavia, stopping at three different lawn sales, taking my sweet time, and finally getting the mortar and bricks I need to repair the back wall.

Upon getting back, the car is parked back in the yard, but the grass is short underneath it, and the pile of bikes is still in the front yard, along with a bunch of other crap.

(yeah, it's a bit of a tap dance to get into the house right now)

All being quiet, I decide to start some laundry before seeing how the bricks I measured for were going to fit in my attempt to fix the back wall.

The bricks fit (again, more on wall repair in later post - I will really try to make it interesting, I promise), and I went to get the laundry out of the machine to hang on the clothesline I installed out back a week ago.  

As I'm putting the laundry into a basket, Josh comes in from his car carrying the faux AK-47 BB gun he came home with a week ago (along with a paintball gun, which he shot at the back of the house and left orange paint on the wall that I hosed off.  In the area where the trash was.  There's a theme here...).  He had a pissed off look on his face.  I paused for a moment, heard continued silence, then took my laundry out to the line.

I'm about halfway through hanging it up when I hear what sounds like a tree branch breaking overhead.  I stop (the tree lost some major branches in the last windstorm), and I pause.  Then I hear it again, and see leaves exploding off of the tree right in front of me.  I instinctively crouch, and look for the source.

No....he can't be...is he seriously just shooting that thing out the back window?  He's not that stupid...

I go inside and bang on his door, and wait for a few moments.  Nothing.  No sound.  I shake my head, and go back out.

A couple of minutes later, and the leaves start exploding again.  I walk along the edge of the house, and shout up and the top of my lungs, "HEY!!!!  I'M WORKING BACK HERE!!!!!"

It stops.  I wondered for a moment if it was intentional, but scoped out the window later and realized he honestly couldn't see me from there.  He just wanted to shoot out the window at leaves to blow off steam.

I saw him on the path later on - he was coming up, and I was going to eat my dinner in the back yard.  He was carrying his middle son, who said, "Hi!"  (He's 2 and a half.  He's at that "HI HI HI HI" stage.)  Josh said nothing, taking a drag from his cigarette as he passed, in that unmistakable "I am too cool to talk to you" kind of drag.   

When I came back inside, I heard his wife screaming at him about the fact that he needs to get off his lazy ass and get some shit done around here.  (They've been married a little over a month now, and she's about five months pregnant with child number four.)

Given all that, I fully expected some sort of crap to happen tonight that was going to involve having to call the cops, but it's been quiet, for which I'm grateful.  Though I am idly curious to see how long the pile of bikes stays in the front yard.  And to see what tomorrow will bring.

Useful systems and tools for productivity

There are a million productivity tools out there on the market, most of which are useless.  I'm trying out a few of them while I'm also trying to change habits and kick-start a few things.  I'll share what I've been utilizing, and how it's been working.

There's a website called Zen Habits that has been leading the charge in habit formation.  Frankly put, most everything I've seen in the past year about habit formation seems to have stolen it outright from Leo, and he doesn't seem to care.  He's got a paid portion of the site called Sea Change (10 bucks a month) with special articles and a focus every month.  Last month was Getting Up Early (I failed to participate, plan on doing as a side project), and right now it's De-Cluttering.  http://Zenhabits.net

5 min Journal is an iPhone app I've been using - it's a Gratitude journal, remarkably uncomplicated, and really does only take 5 min per session (morning and evening).  I'm getting better about using it, and I'm trying to make it an every day thing.  It's a great way to start the day.

The 100 day challenge is a motivational program that is very direct and straightforward.  And the full program is...expensive.  Given my financial situation, I'm paying for as little as possible, but the motivational videos and other materials are great places to start.  I am setting my own "100 Day Challenge" that will bring me into the first month of school, so the idea of focusing on that long term is really helping me as well.

So those are the major ones I'm using right now.  I do get the regular emails from the Sethi brothers (Ramit and Maneesh), and I get a lot out of those, but those aren't so much systems.  Maneesh is working on a habit device called Pavlok, though a lot of his studies very closely mirror Leo's from Zen Habits, so I'm going to stick with Leo.  I've gotten some other reading suggestions that I'll talk about as well, and if anyone has any suggestions I'm open to them.

Second Foundation: Foundations for systems - cleaning and organizing.

I meant to write this post over a week ago, but Life got in the way, and I haven't had a chance to sit down and write.  Not a bad life getting in the way, just life.

I have always told myself that I thrive in disorder and chaos, but in the past few years that has simply not been the case.  I need order, and I haven't had very much of it around.  So part of the plan for getting things in order this summer is cleaning and organizing.  Streamlining systems so that things that take me WAY too long to figure out become automatic.

The good news about waiting a solid week before writing this is that I can talk about my success at de-cluttering and getting things organized.  I have re-claimed my kitchen for the first time in months.  I have reclaimed and put down the table in the living room.  I have reclaimed the new cabinet I got a few weeks ago that i'm going to use as a dry-sink area.

So my kitchen is now a space of relaxation, which I'm enjoying.  The catch is now to keep that system going to the rest of my apartment, and expanding it from there.  I need to apply the same de-cluttering principles to work as well.

So it's going fairly well so far.  All this decluttering will be worked on as time goes on, and I hope to have a somewhat civilized apartment within two weeks.  That is my goal, and I'm going to keep at it.

First Foundation: Food and Sleep

So apparently the Universe listens very carefully when you make proclamations like this.  And my body decided to focus on two foundations I don't do well at all:  food and sleep.

I felt off all of Tuesday, which I attributed to getting up early on a few hours of sleep.  I also didn't eat much during the day, and was therefore exhausted when I got home.  I planned to relax for a brief moment before heading off to play rehearsal that night at 6:45, which meant getting out of the house by 6:20.  Which meant sure...it's 5:30.  Sit for a moment.

When I opened my eyes, it was 6:55 and my head felt like it was in a dryer pitching around and around.  I emailed a quick apology on my phone to the director, staggered into the kitchen for some water, staggered back to bed, and passed out again until about 5:30 the next morning.

You would think that food and sleep being two of the basic necessities of life, I might have figured them out by now.  But no.  I tend to not cook, wolf down crappy food, and not really pay much attention to my diet.  I'll go through phases where I'll make some effort, but it doesn't stick.  Mostly due to time crunches and such.

So...having some time now this summer...my body has announced we are starting here.  Diet and sleep patterns.  So, here's the basis for the foundations of what I need to do:

• Sleep patterns for waking up early and going to bed at reasonable times

Summertime!!!!!  Sleep in!!!!!  Stay up all night!!!!!!

No.  If I'm going to make a habit out of this, I need to start it when I don't have to.  Which means keeping up getting up "early" starting out, or at least maintaining as time goes on. 

• Regular meal planning

This is where I fall down.  I don't make plans of what I'm going to eat, but come home and stare at the fridge with a "what do I want"?  And since I'm usually exhaused by not eating breakfast (and sometimes not eating lunch), I grab whatever crap happens to be in the fridge or go get slices of greasy pizza at Salvatore's here at school.  Utilizing Sunday as a shopping day and a planning day, I can prep and prepare a plan for the week, even pre-cooking and freezing stuff.  Especially with play rehearsals coming up, this will be an important thing.

• Breakfast.  And lunch.  And dinner involving green bits.

Yes, all three.  And Breakfast does not consist of only coffee.  I actually gave up coffee recently for about a month (stomach issues), but I'm back on a regular routine of a half-pot at home/car ride into work.  I'm guessing this has a lot to do with my energy levels being as low as they are.  I'm supposed to do a meal-planning course with my health insurance, so this would be a good one-two combination of stuff I should get done.

So there's a start.  I did fairly well yesterday: breakfast, lunch (oriental salad with chicken!), and dinner of an egg sandwich.  Today...not so much.  No breakfast, no lunch packed, and dinner is going to be a scramble again due to lack of planning.  So Sunday is going to be the first major meal planning exercise, and for the rest of the week I'm just going to try to see what the blocks are from making this a regular thing.

Alright.  Home to get dinner and run to rehearsal.  Maybe an egg sandwich...?

Building foundations

There are a great many proverbs about the necessity of a solid foundation to do any sort of work of consequence, and there is a lot of truth to that.  Without foundations, everything collapses.  And truth be told, I've been having a multitude of foundation issues.

The basics of human foundations is systems.  Systems and routines for the morning, getting going, doing quality work you want to get done, maintaining order, not getting bogged down in other people's minutae...and frankly put, at this point, I've got nothing.  My morning routine is shot, my meal routine is non-existant, my finances are a disaster, my social life is a farce, my creative work is non-existant, and my work schedule is unfulfilling and bogged down in everyone else's last-minute demands.

However, as a teacher, I am lucky in having a summer vacation.  I did not get summer school this year (application didn't get submitted correctly), which has turned out to be a blessing.  So, I'm going to do some foundation work.

In part of the case, that work is going to be literal foundation work.  The back wall of the apartment house is peeling off, and the rest of the foundation needs patching.  The mortar is crumbling away, and that's the reason the house has already shifted once about seven years ago.  And doing some inspection of things downstairs, the partial patching that was done in the back years ago seems to be holding. 

So my "summer job" (notably because amongst the financial wreckage is owing my landlord money) is going to be fixing and re-setting the back wall, along with patching the foundation.  I'd had a few "cosmetic" fixes in mind (new flooring in kitchen and hallway, where some of the sub-flooring seems to be loose, and also the main foyer hallway), but the foundation work is clearly the most critical.  Without the foundation in place, the entire house goes backwards into the creek.

In a similar fashion, much of my existance is headed creekward if I don't apply some fixes.  I'm 41, which is time enough to fix things, but nearing a critical point.  So I'll be identifying areas I'm working on, including:

• Creative
• Summer prep for school
• Financial
• Basic life areas (morning routines, cleaning, maintaining, etc)
• Relationships (ex and others)

As part of this shift, I'll be keeping track and blogging, since a great deal of personal change is accountability.  So the blog will be a little more active than it has been of late.

Alright - off to get ready for school, prepare for closing up the library for the summer (sort of - explanation of that later), and rehearsal this evening.  Long day ahead. 

The Flight of Driveway Guy

Driveway Guy's car blew a head gasket some time later (I heard all about it from Megan, who had to walk home five miles in the rain while he tried to finagle a tow), and the truck he'd been working on finally showed up in the driveway.

It was a compact truck, nothing like the jacked-up F-150 from before.  (This was the truck he parked on the back lawn and ran into the house, breaking the siding - on my list of summer projects.)  After a short period of time, he got a cap for it at well, though he was still sleeping in the cab.

He handed me a business card one day, with his cell phone number advertising his services as a "handyman".  "You need anything done, just let me know." 

I had hopes this was a sign for the positive - there was significantly less barf in the driveway, the handyman business seemed to be starting up, so I had hopes that maybe he was getting his life together.

The downside was, with the weather warming up, the usual crew of people hanging out with Driveway Guy was no longer limited to who could fit in his truck.  I started parking on the street after finding a beer can inside my car, which I distinctly remembered locking the night before. 

And then one day, driving home, I was passed by Driveway Guy heading the opposite direction at top speed and driving like his ass was on fire.  I pulled into the driveway, and looked down at the deep gouges in the driveway from where he'd clearly pulled out in a hurry.

He passed by the house slowly, but when he started to pull in, the door to Mary's apartment swung open, and Savannah, the younger daughter (16), came running out.  "I meant it, you goddamn fucking bastard!!!!!!!  I've got my phone RIGHT FUCKING HERE!!!!!"

A squeal of tires, and he was gone.

She looked at me, and I looked at her.  "Holy crap - what did he do?"

She glared at his tailgate as he sped down the road.  "Bastard stole my debit card and took out about 60 bucks.  Told him if I ever saw him here again I was pressing charges of breaking and entering and theft."

"That's serious."

"Yep.  And since he's still on probation...that's some serious jail time.  It's worth the 60 bucks to have him out of my sister's life.  I'm amazed you never called when he was smoking weed in the driveway."

I shrugged.  "If he'd been alone, I would have.  Megan was always with him."

She nodded.  "Well, he won't be coming back."

And he didn't.  Megan started seeing another guy a few months later, and I saw her in the foyer doing laundry.  She looked a lot healthier - no bags under the eyes, smiling - and I told her.

"Yeah, everyone was kinda worried about me.  But thanks."

I keep scanning the local paper to see if he shows up in the court rundown, but nothing so far.  Fingers crossed it stays that way.