So...it's been a month....and...a lot has happened, not even counting the move from New Hampshire to Colorado, it's still a lot. So much...honestly too much. I...Well, before I get ahead of myself, I'd like to give shoutouts to my Patreon backers, especially now with my 'Non-consensual, involuntary long-term vacation' stymying my output. Thanks again guys, it helps more than you know. I know I say that a lot, but seriously, I mean it all the more now.
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So...where should I start? I feel like I've been saying that a lot lately. But my memories from the past month are...kind of a smear in my head. Jumbled up, as if my brain is trying to help me forget the bulk of them to shield me from the trauma. Okay, that's probably exaggeration...I guess...but as of late it just feels like the hit's they keep on a' comin'.
As I mentioned, I'm in Colorado now. Despite mine and my mom's best efforts, we couldn't find a new place in New Hampshire before our hotel stay expired. We simply ran out of time, and because of that we were forced to move out to stay with my brother in western Colorado.
I mentioned in earlier posts that I was looking into a RV to make the trip, should it come to that. I had even gone as far to put 300 dollars down to hold a spot, expecting to have totally blown that money on a reservation we'd never use. But here we are I suppose, so I guess I didn't have to worry about the 300 dollars being wasted, instead I ended up wasting...far, far more....
We decided to go with the rental RV route for a number of reasons, the primary one being my Mother's health. I thought having a nice rental RV would roll comfort and expediency into one relatively inexpensive solution. My mom was afraid of flying, and even had we went that route, I would have had to have my car sent ahead of us, as well as our meager belongings, and I would have had to figure out plane transfers and transportation to and from each airport. At the time, it seemed like the more expensive and troublesome option. With an RV we could store what little we had in it comfortably, and we could tow my car on a hitch on the back, condensing all those separate services into one. Also, traveling by RV...well, we thought it would be relaxing. We thought we could turn it into something like that into a sort of...memorable vacation that would help distract from the primary purpose of the move. A once in a lifetime opportunity to see the country and try to...disconnect from the misery of the fire, and just...feeling like we had hit a wall with nowhere to go. And I wish...that had been the case, to be honest.
Picking up the RV was probably the smoothest part of the whole trip. I had done me research, as well as watched all the orientation videos, so I 'should' have had a good idea of what I was getting into. And at first blush, the RV I was picking looked pretty close to what I had seen in the video, aside from being dirtier than anticipated. While giving me an overview of the vehicle, the dealer tried and failed to start the generator. He told me that after I drove for a while it would charge up, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt. This would later be proven to be a lie, as the RV helpline would tell me "Yeah, he shouldn't have said that, it's simply untrue."
Pulling out onto the road, it became clear to me after a fairly short time that the RV's shocks were completely shot. You could feel every pothole, every speedbump, even just the general vibration of driving, I could feel all of it as though there was nothing separating me from the surface of the road. Of course, by the time I realized that this wasn't normal for an RV I already had my smart car hitched up on the back of the rental tow and was on my way back to load up our belongings onto it. Halfway back to the hotel, I noticed that my smart car's hood had blown off at some point during the drive. The outer shell had separated from the hood frame. This was something that had been broken for a while, because I hadn't locked my hood in place properly months before, and a blustery few weeks had split the cover from the frame because I didn't realize why it wasn't staying put until it was too late. I thought I had it attached well enough that it wouldn't blow free despite the damage, and it had made the trip down from NH to south MASS without so much as a problem. But just being on the trailer hitch for thirty to forty minutes must have undone whatever I had done to hold it in place. That one was the only thing I can say was fully on me, but I should have taken it as an omen of what was to come.
Due to said mishaps, and running around, on top of scheduling conflicts, I not only had to miss out on seeing my other brother in Connecticut, but we ended up having to stay an additional night at the hotel out of pocket. This would become the theme of the entire trip. A trip that was supposed to take a single week, but ended up nearly taking two.
On the first leg of the trip, we couldn't get the generator to start at the end of the day, forcing us to take another hotel stop as my mom couldn't rest in the back with the AC on for any of the driving portions, and was left in terrible pain from riding passenger seat all day. However, even if the generator had been working, the lack of shocks would have left her in awful pain regardless. (The beds are not even the slightest bit thick) We stayed over an additional day so I could get someone to fix the generator, as the RV helpline advised us to do since them guiding me through all the ways to troubleshoot the generator hadn't solved the problem, only to find out that there was no one that could service it for several days. So with that, we were forced to push onward in an effort to try to keep on schedule as they weren't offering to comp the waiting days.
The next day, my mother lost her footing thanks to the fact that the RV has weird, tiny steps in it and fell in the RV while we were parked, spilling into the stairwell and nearly out of the RV and onto the concrete of the parking lot outside. This forced us to take another two hotel days in order to allow her to recover, and a hospital visit to make sure nothing was broken.
Once we were back on the road, the passenger side mirror broke in such a way that it would no longer stay pointed at the back end of the RV. I had to get out to straighten it, which proved to be pointless as it took less than a miles drive without shocks to make it cockeyed again. Once more, there was no one who could service the issue in a reasonable amount of time, and so my mom was forced to monitor my passenger side window for the remaining trip so I could turn right.
Essentially by this point, every 'leg' of the trip was punctuated by an extra hotel stay and another broken part on the RV. By the time we were closing in on Colorado, I was trying to work out with my brother over the phone for any way I could somehow dump the RV in Denver, and make it the rest of the way with my smart hitched to a rental truck or something, but everyone seems to be moving right now, and so nothing was available that could divert me from having to double back to Denver to drop off the RV.
I will say at this point, the only, and I mean the only upside was that a lot of the country was very pretty to look at. The mountains in upstate New York, the great plains, all pretty in their own way. But once we entered Mesa County...well, it was pretty disappointing. While it should have been obvious by the name “Mesa County”, the last 200 miles of the trip were in pure desert prairie. Dusty, dry, hot desert prairie. The worst possible climate for someone like me and my mom who can't tolerate heat well. My brother had...heavily glossed over just how drab and dusty everything is seemingly to get us to come out here, and now that we were seeing it, I know it sounds silly, but...it was just such a letdown. The final kind of...sour note on what was a very hellish trip, and technically my part of the trip wasn't over yet. I couldn't get a flight back to Grand Junction the following day and had to set up a flight for Saturday, adding yet another day to the already overdue RV.
In the middle of the ride to Denver...I finally broke. It had taken nearly four months to finally hit me, but when it did it came down like a ton of bricks. Everything, the fire, the lack of help from town to find a home, being forced to leave a state I hadn't realized I'd miss so much, especially when contrasted by Grand Junction. I just started sobbing. Visceral, ugly weeping on and off for at least an hour's worth of my trip back to the RV depot. I hadn't vented, really vented in so long, and the added stress of the trip and seeing this place just finally broke the dam. And while I'm not over it, probably not by a long shot, it felt good to get that much-needed emotional release.
I had been instructed to note and hold all of my issues with the RV until I dropped it off at the depot to be compensated for everything that had gone wrong. By that point, I was at the very least looking for half of my money back from the excursion. Between the gas, the tolls, the hotel stays that we shouldn't have needed, the extra days, the RV had become a money pit, and I was determined to get some degree of my investment back. However, the depot told me the most they could comp me was 500 dollars, and that if I took it, I wouldn't be able to negotiate for more with the company's customer service line. And so, I refused to take the 500, or sign anything, and instead wrote a strongly worded email to customer service, an email I'm still waiting for a reply on.
From there I caught an Uber, and then a flight back to Grand Junction, where my brother picked me up and took me back to the house.
With the mess that was mine and my mom's personal “Lampoon's Vacation Movie” behind us, we were hoping that we would finally reach a turning point. That we were finally taking a step in the right direction, and things would get easier going forward....but that seems to have become a pipe dream at this point.
Within two days of arriving at my brother's, he, his pregnant wife, and my two-year-old niece all caught covid. Thankfully the vaccine kept my mother and me from getting it, but we still had to keep quarantined, get tested, and be mindful about exposure to them because there was still a chance we could get it even with the vax. Not that that mattered as much, because the family dynamic had quickly returned to the same sort of toxic crap that it always had been, so I've been walking on eggshells since we arrived, and have even more of a fire under my ass to get out of this place as soon as possible. Preferably somewhere more green and less dusty, that also doesn't get nearly as hot as this place does.
Then there were problems with my mother's doctors, something which still hasn't been fully resolved, and is setting up more problems for us down the road. And of course, there's still the not so small matter of us finding a place to live that's affordable, safe, and is far enough away from the litterbox that is the Colorado Plateau that you can barely find a sliver of loose, lifeless sand amidst all the green trees and cool air.
I miss New Hampshire, I hadn't realized just how much it had become my home until we were forced out. And as pretty as some of the more mountainous parts of Colorado were, it was....it just wasn't home. It isn't home. I'm sure that seems childish considering the circumstances, but I can't help myself I guess. If it wasn't for the fact that I have my elderly mom to look after, with no one, including the brother I'm currently staying with, to trust to actually give a shit about looking after her, I'd be back in NH still looking for a place, or perhaps staying with friends rather than live amidst the nightmare that is the Wasty family dynamic.
As for WIPs...I've got good news, bad news, and good news again? Sort of a news sandwich I guess. While it was tough thanks to the chip shortages and Graphics Card scalping (Seriously, the graphics card I had bought when building my PC last September had gone up by 500 dollars.) I was able to replace most of my PC, and am expecting the parts to arrive soon, as well as my tablet. The bad news is that I can't exactly set it up here so I can work, and even if I could the internet is terrible up here. I upgraded my phone plan to get unlimited data, but hotspoting and tethering is still limited. However, I do have access to a scanner, as some of you have seen if you checked my previously uploaded sketch snapshots to my gallery. I re-scanned them and posted the higher quality, cleaner versions. I have some sketches in my queue, waiting to be lined, but between the busy last...month or so, and my...emotional state, I just haven't been up to it.
So....I guess here's hoping that we're...finally going to reach that turning point here. That the right apartment is just a few weeks away, and that soon enough we'll be back on our own and no longer a burden to my brother. Then life can finally start to return to some degree of normalcy again, and more importantly, I can get back to work and entertaining you guys again.
Thanks for sticking it out as long as you have, both Patreons, donators, fans, the lot of you. The fact that you guys still interested in seeing me come back just makes me all the more eager to do just that. I'm sorry if this was a...particularly dense journal, but....I felt like I needed to explain everything and...well...a lot happened. Once things get closer to normal, expect for these entries to go back to less information about my personal life (Unless it's going to get in the way of work), and more progress reports on future projects.
Thanks for sticking around,
-Wasty.
