I should be sitting outside during the coolest part of the day sipping my coffee, but I also need to organize my life in blocks of time, and I’m overdue for this post. I have many unanswered emails and other things to do, but instead of knocking them out, I started cold-stratifying bonsai seeds as I think growing a few different bonsai trees (obviously a very long-term project) will be fun and low-investment. I’ve always been pretty interested in plants, this is the first time I have enough real sunlight to do so. When I was a kid, I had a hydroponic vegetable garden (before hydroponics were cool) and a terrarium full of venus flytraps and pitcher plants, which are not the easiest plants to sustain, especially in upstate New York.

I learned a lot this summer about plants, heat, sun and altitude: my morning glories dutifully covered my porch, but they only flowered twice, and they drink too much water to be feasible in full sun in the future. My bougainvillea grew up to the roof of my house, but it never flowered, so either the days are too long or I overfertilized it. My sword lilies popped beautifully, and I will probably buy more bulbs for next year, even though their foliage is ugly and they take forever to flower. My dahlias bloomed but the colors were ultimately disappointing and I’ll probably buy cuttings next year instead of relying solely on seeds so the blooms are bigger.

To my delight, I have two beautiful elephant ears indoors. Of the three shitty-looking sprouted bulbs I got, two survived and one is huge. It took me a few months to find the right solution to tiny, annoying little aphids, and I had to spray everything down with Neem oil and buy sticky traps, but the combo worked perfectly. I walk past a house every day with HUGE tomato plants so I will be doing Jersey tomatoes next year, I felt unsure about my success this summer but I’m pretty confident now.

Keeping plants hydrated here in peak summer is a major pain in the ass. And I talk about next summer, I suppose, because I think there’s a reasonable chance I’ll stay here for a bit longer, given I still have no idea what I want to do next in my life. The job postings I was waiting for were posted while I was gone, but have restrictive office requirements that would require immediate relocation (again), which I think is stupid, and consequently am not applying. I hate the heat here and am growing more frustrated as these 90 degree days continue; I used to get crankier and crankier as the summer continued back East, but I suspect it will stay warmer longer here than in the Catskills. I hate it. I will never be a summer person, but I’d be a lot worse off if it was also humid. I will say life has been easier now that I’ve fully given up and begun wearing shorts, though I will not wear them to work.

Speaking of, I am actually pretty happy with where I’m at in my job. While I lost my peer group bestie to a promotion, I also lost the peer who annoyed me the most. Given my major complaint about this job has been the other managers in my group, I am almost out of the woods on that. Managing 19 people (soon to be 20) in 3 different offices across two states is not particularly easy, but I am definitely not bored. My primary team is performing well; this co-located Texas team is not. We (Denver) went through business reviews this week, and Monday I’ll head to Dallas, then to Austin, to prep the other team for theirs the following week. The process of onboarding new people, training them up, dealing with two very different levels of tenure and competence and assuring I provide support for all three offices is pretty interesting and forces me to be as efficient as possible.

I will probably continue to do this through the remainder of 2022, and potentially into 2023. To be clear, this job does not spark joy, but for an industrious person, doing the job of two people instead of one is very rewarding.

I realize I’m rambling about plants and work when ultimately I’ve been away for the most of the month; my trip abroad began with (of course) a typical Turkish Airlines delay that forced me to run from one end of Istanbul airport to the other in 15 min to make my connection to Tbilisi (they literally closed the door behind me); my bag did not make it onto the plane, but showed up later in the evening. I was happy just to actually get there on time and feel like I was comfortably away from my life in what at this point is definitely my favorite foreign city (New York is still my favorite American city, sorry not sorry). I was slimy and exhausted by the time I got there, but I was over the moon to be there and we went straight to our standard breakfast spot to stuff our faces with khachapuri.

Departing from JFK was a good opportunity to drop in on my sister, and my parents ended up driving down for dinner. My sister and her husband finally moved out of their shithole garden level unit in Belleville and moved into a really beautiful, sunny apartment in Rahway. My sister and I are very different — she has very few hobbies, no college education and is mostly a homebody — but she got a second pug and has been showing her, so I’m pretty stoked she is busy and doing stuff she’s genuinely passionate about. I really wish they’d get the hell out of New Jersey, but as I said, we are very different people. I’d love for us to eventually live closer to one another: we hated each other when we were kids but we are very close now, and she continues to look creepily similar to me as she gets older.

My grandmother passed away the last day of my trip, which was incredibly sad but was not entirely unexpected. My parents were in Africa and I’m sad she died alone, but it seems like it happened pretty suddenly and no one would have been able to make it there regardless. I think a lot of people feel regret when their grandparents die: that they should’ve spent more time, paid better attention, learned more from their parents’ parents. I do not feel that way. I called her every weekend from the time I left for college until fairly recently (it was increasingly difficult to reach her, she had no phone and the facility was not always able to transfer me). I saw her in December when I was home, and every other time I went back to the Northeast, and I had a pretty special relationship with her. She was a very cranky person when we were kids (I’ve referred to her many times as the Slavic Olivia Soprano): I found this hilarious and endearing. I’ve learned to make all of our family’s food in my adulthood, from pierogies to cabbage rolls to Russian cutlets (they are like flat, pan fried meatballs). In the past decade, I’ve retrieved all of our family’s naturalization records, birth certificates and other documentation to nail down what happened and when, as many people in her community never talked about the “old country” and only ever wanted a fresh start in America. Every year of my adult life that I’ve been in the US for Christmas, I’ve done Ukrainian Christmas (Eve) dinner, whether I am with my family or (more often) not.

My grandmother only got so far as elementary school: she started working as a child and worked hard her entire life. She had my father at 17, and my grandfather was significantly older. She lived a very modest life; she never flew in an airplane, never left the US, my parents had to drag her kicking and screaming on any adventure farther than the grocery store. She lived in two houses as an adult: the one my parents live in now, and the one across the street. She never tasted a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette. She lived vicariously through all of us as we grew older and began traveling (especially my parents, who did not venture abroad until I went with them the first time, and now have been all over, from the Amazon river to Galapagos to Greece and Africa). My one regret is that she lived through my cousin dying of a heroin overdose (and was lucid enough to suffer emotionally as a result), and my piece of shit aunt — her fuck-up daughter — calling to try to collect his modest life insurance policy payout. My parents buried him. Conversely, I’m happy I went to the trouble to have the beautiful French chairs I always wanted from her house reupholstered and shipped here so I can look at them every day. I have a piece of her life in my house and will for the remainder of mine.

My trip also concluded with me getting COVID. It took me 2 years and 8 months and going overseas to test positive. I actually believe I ended up with the lightest symptoms of anyone I know, though I just may have higher tolerance for suffering. Razorblades in my throat, a very mild dry cough and a VERY runny nose, with a half day of feeling like my own voice was bouncing off the insides of my skull and some severe nausea/clamminess. I recovered quickly, though I had a lingering wet cough and congestion and was sleeping 8h+ a night for awhile, which is not typical for me. I sadly missed out on my trip to Chicago, but recovered with negative results in time to get back into the office later into the week after I returned. Having COVID actually forced me to chill out and recover from the trip, so it was ultimately a mixed bag.

My trip was wonderful, and it was equally wonderful to get home. I had hired a dog sitter off of Rover to drop in on Fuji 3-4 times a day and while he has the best reviews of anyone in the area on Rover, I was not impressed: he did not walk her once despite committing to do so, he failed to show up one night and never communicated that he was not coming (according to him, he was in a car accident, and yet showed up the next day in the same car which was unharmed), and he spent very little time with her. Thankfully my neighbors were around to pop in periodically and we’ve decided to just trade off on drop-ins for each other’s pets for the foreseeable future (I am taking care of their husky and cat now, and they’re on Fooj duty next week). This was an ambitious experiment to determine whether the dog was better off just staying home alone for 3 weeks, and despite my dog sitter not meeting my expectations, she was in a much better mental state than she would’ve been if I had kenneled her the entire time. I checked on her couch-lounging regularly and tossed her many Furbo treats, and she was just fine, so I will definitely opt for her staying here alone overnight versus worrying about putting her in a kennel or boarding facility. Fuji’s dog aggression is annoying AF but otherwise she’s pretty much perfectly behaved.

The time away helped me further appreciate my living situation, and while it still pains me to pay so much to live here in this neighborhood (there is nothing for sale in my neighborhood under $800K except for a $570K empty lot, to give you an idea of the insane prices in Denver), I’ve spent a lot of time and money making this place somewhere I want to be, and it’s paid dividends. I can’t say I’m in love with Denver by any means, but it’ll do for the time being, and it was actually pretty fantastic to have so many of my new friends at Brutal Assault and in Prague to end the trip. Last weekend, two excellent people got married at a Czech bar here and it was a blast. I think my life is set up pretty nicely all around… it took some time, but my priorities were spot-on and everything is how I want it to be.

My FitBit Charge4 somehow broke into about 6 different pieces when I got home, and while I was tempted to buy another fairly inexpensive FitBit (well, first, I tried to superglue it back together, but too many springs popped out and I gave up), I was intrigued by Juan’s Garmin watch and figured I’d cough up the $ for something that will actually track my exercise (the FitBit never reliably tracked the stairmill workouts). I ended up with the fenix 6, which retails at $549 and was on sale for $350. I am extremely pleased so far, and it’s been about two weeks. No ragrets, and this thing actually tracks my workouts correctly. It is kind of a manly watch for me, but what it lacks in femininity it makes up for in data quality.

I also noticed yesterday that I’ve logged 35 days of PTO for the year, which is a vast improvement over the 10 I took last year. I bunched my time into the middle/end of the year as I wanted to master my responsibilities first, but I’m coming up on a trip back to Mexico in a few weeks and I am really looking forward it. Heading back to NY/NJ in November, then my parents are visiting, and I’m considering on dropping in on a friend in Vegas for a weekend in December. Outside of that, I plan to stay home alone for the holidays and relax… I have always hated flying back to the NY metro area at the busiest time of year.

I’m actually going to stop here, and drop in some photo galleries and thoughts around the destinations in the next few posts, coming soon (possibly tomorrow and/or Monday).