SoOoO Much to Say Part 5 in Book Six: Trying to Hold On 2019

Alright y’all… between the Memorial Day Weekend and Work keeping me busy… this is kind of all being done at once. SO… I separated it out into various portions to hopefully make it easier to read. The best way to read this is Chronologically so… in the following order.

SoOoO Much to Say Part 1
SoOoO Much to Say Part 2
SoOoO Much to Say Part 3
SoOoO Much to Say Part 4
SoOoO Much to Say Part 5
SoOoO Much to Say Part 6
SoOoO Much to Say Part 7

BEGIN Part Five

So, Part Four ended with me finally finishing a very court heavy and very busy day at work. Heck, I was actually surprised when I was leaving work that Wife hadn’t called me to discover why I was running late!

I pulled in to the driveway and walked into the house. Nala freaked out like she had been left alone for hours. Which is weird cuz Wife’s car was in the garage. So I pet the shaking, trembling, wagging little body a bunch and looked around the house for Wife. Not in the house. Okay, back yard? No. Not in the back yard. But then I caught site of her. She looked at me very confused. Why was I home already? I laughed a little and said that it was almost 5:30. Her face went white as she stated, “I’ve already been out here for three hours?! Poor Nala!!!” I asked what she’d been doing but as I got closer I could see. She was using an old fashioned Push Mower to cut the grass. I asked if that means she’d finally asked a neighbor to borrow a mower. NOPE. Did you call the shop to see if they’d give us a loaner while they had ours? NOPE. She spent $62 bucks and bought a non-motorized old fashioned push mower!

::HEAD DESK::

So the night before, we have this big argument about trying to find cheap flights and rental cars on a FREE TRIP but you’re willing to spend $62 to avoid talking to the neighbors?!?!?!?!?! WHAT?! Fine. Fine. I don’t actually care. I got my flight plan approved; Wife can now worry less about the yard; fine. Though… Wife is right. Poor Nala! Nala went from being able to harass MBFITWW for three days plus me being home for three days… to MBFITWW leaving, me being back at work, and Wife being outside for “most of the day.” No wonder Nala was desperate for people interaction, lol. I came back inside the house, sat on the couch, and just pet her for about 30 minutes. After about 20 minutes, she put half of her body on my leg and put her head on my belly and fell asleep.

I somewhat disentangled myself from Nala as it got closer to 7 and went out to check on Wife and bring her a glass of water. Apparently, both Nala and I are secretly ninjas because Wife didn’t hear either of us approaching her. When I started speaking, it scared the ever living bejeezus out of her… which she reacted to angrily. Not, “Oh my goodness you scared me” but more of a “Why the fuck would you do that? Do you think you’re being funny?” kind of reaction. Of course… I didn’t do it intentionally and told her so. I was just giving her water. And I asked her what she wanted to have for food. She requested the Pesto Skillet meal. Nala decided to stay outside, since Wife was now mowing the gated section and Nala could run around the backyard happily keeping her eye on Wife.

I get the food started and Wife walks in. She is feeling sore (duh) and has completely sweated through all of her clothes. She asks me to get the mail since she had forgotten to. I finish stirring the skillet meal and go check on the mail. By the time I get back, Wife is stirring the dinner and looks over at me. I lay the mail on the table and she says, “If I hadn’t been here, you’d have burnt dinner.” (Another moment where I just.. inwardly sigh. I started dinner because I figured you would appreciate not cooking after being in the yard for 5 hours. You asked me to do something and after I do it; you greet me with criticism. THANKS).

So we eat dinner and go to the living room to watch TV and I play with Nala. But two things I’m noticing. One: Nala has developed an aggressive licking habit. Like… she is constantly licking at her vulva. And as all the dogs I’ve known were either Boy Dogs or older past Mom Dogs… I don’t know how to deal with it. Like… it is an orifice of the body… if she keeps aggressively licking it… couldn’t that cause an infection? What if she’s licking it because there already is an infection? What if she’s sick? What if she has some kind of doggy disorder or disease and she’s trying to deal with it by constantly licking her vulva but we’re not doing anything about it? In the midst of that thought process, I notice a new red mark on her belly that wasn’t there when I got home! So of course… that increases my worry! Now my dog is incessantly licking her vulva and she has a noticeable red mark on her belly!!

Of course, I asked Facebook. I have a friend who runs a veterinary clinic and a cousin who runs an animal shelter… not to mention many friends who do Domestic or Commercial Farming so… hope for quick answers on Facebook is less “dumb and stupid” than it might otherwise seem. I think I’ll just adopt the wait and see approach. If her behavior becomes sluggish, if she starts exhibiting more signs of illness or injury… then I’ll rush her to the vet. But for right now… I’ll just chalk it up to Nala’s first time on a mowed lawn and keep my fingers crossed.

Of course… I’ve been home since 5:30. Wife came back inside around 7. We ate dinner, watched TV, played with the dog until 9:30. Then Wife just started channel surfing and cruising YouTube and Netflix. SOOOooo, I look over at my wife and say, “Wife?” She snaps her head at me and says, “You want to play video games?” in that judgmental, harsh, I’m already angry tone. I say, “Yeah. Just a little. I’m likely going to bed around 10:30 since I had a long day. Why did you say it that way? So angry?” She goes back to channel surfing and says, “It’s just predictable that’s all. Go ahead!” and keeps just looking at the TV. On my descent to the basement the following goes through my head, “Okay, we try to make you a part of our entire weekend with the guest and you actively refuse. I’m home this evening and taking care of house and dog things. When you come in, you don’t ask about my day. You don’t ask how I am. You don’t engage me in any way. BUT when I want to go do video games, you get snarky? What the hell even?“

And that was Tuesday.

Wednesday morning… I really wanted to get breakfast. Like Casey’s or… something. But no time. Wednesdays are Magistrate Day and I wanted to make sure things were being taken care of.

Of course… 8:55 a.m.... I’ve been at work for less than an hour. Clerk of Courts calls. The Sovereign Citizen is back. He’s upset that the County Attorney isn’t over at the courthouse, he has court today, where is he?! The Clerk explains that the court he’s there for is scheduled at 11:00 a.m. and the Assistant County Attorney will be over then. Sovereign Citizen tells her that it is bullshit that he is present at the Court House it is time for COURT! She calls us to warn us. My immediate reaction is:

“God. Damn. Sovereign. Citizen. Psychopath. He has court scheduled at 11:00. He believes that he is not governed by the laws of the United States. However, he does believe that as a government employee, I should drop what I’m doing whenever he decides to show up at my office building screaming to be seen immediately. At 8:45 a.m. Because “he had court so why isn’t the attorney here yet!?” When he shows up at court 2 hours early. This guy… is going to make me fucking lose it. I mean… I understand… clearly mental health issues! And I don’t care what anyone believes… if you were born in the United States, grew up in the United States, have lived your entire life in the United States, and yet somehow passionately believe that the laws of the United States don’t apply to you? There are CLEARLY mental health issues!”

BUT… the guy never shows up. Instead, we find him guilty by default. And now I’m wondering… maybe he isn’t “primarily sovereign citizen, so clearly mental health issues”… and maybe he’s more “primarily mental health issues, so susceptible to sovereign citizen arguments.”

Since the gentleman didn’t storm my offices, it gave me the opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while. In my County, if you are ticketed for Driving Under Suspension… I want you to have a valid license. You see… Iowa is a piss poor place for people who don’t or can’t drive. There is simply no attempt at a public transit system in Farm Counties so without your license? You’re stuck out in the boonies with no means of transportation. So the deal was always, “You have six months to produce a valid driver’s license, temporary restricted license, work permit, or other form of legal driver permission. If you do so, we’ll plea you down to a lesser sentence that will not affect your driving record.” The only problem is… a lot of these people aren’t exactly capable of being responsible. So after 6 months… they come back and say, “I don’t have it. But I can get it!” And the whole process takes forever and becomes a waiting game that simply sucks court time and resources. I wanted to put a stop to that. So I’ve developed a written form that can be filed with the courts. On it, the plea is clearly discussed… the defendant must clearly mark if they wish to Plead as Charged, Accept the Plea Offer, or Request Trial. If they accept the plea offer on paper and just put off following through on the plea… then the plea offer has legal authority and the individual CANNOT simply say, “Sorry, I forgot.” So… hopefully that will work and help the Magistrate out!

But at Magistrate Hearings? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. I often bitch about Traffic Ticket stuff because so few people are actually willing to say You caught me, I was speeding. It is even worse on our particular section of Highway because it is all open, farm land, boring drive… so you can accelerate from 65 to 90 and not even really know it because there aren’t many points of reference. EVEN STILL… individuals with thick accents and massive cultural differences tend to complicate and torture the Traffic Ticket experience. In almost 100% of cases where shit is about to go sideways it is either an African Immigrant of Muslim Name or an Immigrant from the Indian Subcontinent. 100% of the time. Because an American that makes a traffic ticket matter blow up into a cluster fuck… usually calls me to try to bully me into dismissing… and when I don’t, but offer them something in the middle, they take it and everything is resolved. For these other individuals, like the man today, they don’t call ahead or do anything to mitigate. They show up at court and tell me that I need to dismiss the ticket. I tell them that we don’t do things that way. They can either (1) pay the ticket; (2) negotiate a lower fee if possible; (3) hire an attorney to discuss the matter; or (4) ask that it be set for trial. Without fail, after I explain this to them… they return to arguing why I should dismiss the ticket. Today, the reason was… I’ll quote the man directly. “What you are doing is trusting the officer. You are trusting the officer, why you don’t trust me? I am telling you I could not have been going so fast. Maybe the officer was angry with me. Why you trust officer and not me?” I’m diplomatic and simply reiterated his options. Because… he has to select from those options. What I really wanted to say? Dude, what the fuck? Do you honestly have no clue how any of this works? I mean, most people don’t know the inner workings of the law; but they at least realize that if an officer gives a speeding ticket, the State’s Attorney is going to represent getting that ticket paid. I’m not just going to “take your word for it” and dismiss the ticket!

Then… an easy afternoon? Well… sort of but not exactly. Lots of putting out fires, lots of getting things taken care of in preparation for the end of the week and then 58 minutes before the end of work?
Phone Call. You know it is bad when the secretary apologizes before transferring the call! Right off the bat, the woman launches into how there is a warrant for her arrest but it isn’t her fault because she’s distraught from being arrested the first time, and there was a death in her family, and her daughter is dating an abusive man, and she has a young son, and there are mental health issues in her family so really the issue is that she doesn’t know what day it is and didn’t realize that she had to be in court yesterday because she thought she had to be in court today and she had to quit her job today and so I have to fix things for her!

Except… I don’t even have access to this case. Legally. I don’t have the ability to legally file anything on this case yet. And then she monologues for twenty minutes and I get to connect the dots a little more. This is the mother of one of my Domestic Abuse Assault (DAA) victims. This particular DAA victim was super passionate that we not do anything that interrupts her ability to stay in the home with her abuser. Now that starting to make sense. Better to be with the cute marijuana dealer that beats the hell out of her than be with the unhinged emotionally cracked mother. The mother is rambling and repeating simply saying that we need to remove the warrant on the matter because she made a mistake writing it down. With all of the compassion and power in my body at her disposal… there’s nothing I can do. Literally. I have no power to fix this for her. But when I explain that to her, she doesn’t grasp it. I explain to her what is happening, she says, “Right. But here’s the thing…” No, Miss. You weren’t listening. I said “do X”. You’re reacting to me as if I said “do Y.” So listen to me when I say do X. Legally, I’m within my right to simply tell you to fuck off and hang up. I mean… I get it. Stressful situations. But she’s telling me that she already has all of the information I’ve given her. So… if she has all the information and I’m telling her there’s nothing I can do… why am I on a 56 minute phone call right now?! Still going on! Especially when we go over (and over and over and over) when I say, “Call this number on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday” and she says, “So tomorrow”...... I mean.... I know I’m not getting through, she’s not listening, and there may be… some… issues. Kind of an exhausting way to end the work day.

So then I went home and… Wife wasn’t there. Good, actually. That means she’s finally going back to the Cat Shelter. Even if it is just interacting with ONE other person.... even if it is just getting out of the house for a FEW hours a week… I think she definitely needs to do so. So I open the door to the Three Season Room to let Nala back in. That girl has found her voice! She wasn’t barking. But as she was expressing joy at seeing me, followed immediately by concern for WHERE’S MOM? she started making a various assortment of high pitched whining and garbling noises. She… definitely has her own style of vocalizations. To try to help get her energy focused, I took her out back and we played for a while until she got bitey. Rule is: If you ignore the toy 3 times in order to bite the human, play time is over. Came back inside, Wife came home… Nala was crazy. I honestly think the weather might affect her moods , too. There were massive Tornado Warnings all over the county with a confirmed funnel touchdown in my town. And Nala was hyperhyperbiteyzoomie all evening.

As for Wife and I and activities? Well… as Wife was cooking we kind of had it out. I talked to her about how upset I was about her intentionally declining to engage with me or our guest for two days. She responded that, lately, when I drink I tend to get an edge and act bitter. I admitted that it is because I tend to have all these feelings, concerns, and hurt about our marriage but I don’t feel like I can actually talk to her about it in a mature way because typically she’ll just yell a lot, cry, stop talking to me, and then pretend nothing happened the next day. So we had a long discussion/argument/yell session about that. We covered a lot of topics. Like how increasingly she’s become an absolute stone cold bitch about me playing video games. Her response? Twofold. (1) When we’re just sitting watching TV, she gets somewhat hypnotized. When I leave to play video games, she remembers that all we tend to do is “Couch Stuff” and she’s upset by that. To which I offered understanding but still pointed out that what happens in that scenario is when it is Wife’s chosen activity, she doesn’t consciously feel bad or say, ‘let’s do something else.’ When it is my chosen activity, that‘s when she has a problem with things. (2) She actually said that ‘everything is different’ now that her main TV is on one floor of the house and the gaming TV is downstairs. Like… when I couldn’t play games much because I was letting her watch the TV it was fine but now that I can play video games without having to wait for her to stop watching TV it isn’t? Worse. For her it becomes more of a “conscious thing”. Like… when the Main Floor TV was the video game TV, she could just sit down and watch “because it was there.” Now that she would actually have to leave the main floor, travel down the stairs, and make a choice to spend time with me down there… it seems a lot more of a hassle. Which I told her meant basically: What you’re saying is that you’re upset that we don’t spend time together while at the same time saying that you don’t want to do anything to spend time together if it is in anyway inconvenient for you. Then I mentioned how even the small things like when I made dinner, got the mail, and was greeted by criticism… how that isn’t cool. Wife responded, “I do appreciate that you did that but…” and then listed all the ways her criticism was valid, necessary, important, and correct. And I called her on that. Like… seriously? I just mentioned how it was crap that in the middle of trying to do things for you, all you did was criticize… and in discussing it, you went right back to criticism. You didn’t say, ‘I appreciate what you were doing and I’m glad it all worked out.’ You said, “I appreciate what you were doing and now let me tell you why you were doing it wrong all over again.” So that whole thing mostly just ended with Wife saying, “It’s just hard to realize how incapable I am of considering other people. I work at it but I also know that… when the work gets hard, I don’t do it. And that’s unacceptable.” After that we ate dinner, watched Jeopardy (God my Wife hates James Holzhauer), watched What We Do In the Shadows, watched Archer, watched Samantha Bee, watched some highlights of Mock the Week, and went to bed.