Hello 2023

 It's strange but this whole year has been strange.

I've been pretty fully shut-in the last few months, to the point where looking at my car and thinking, at 8pm on a Saturday night, that "huh I could go to Home Depot" feels weirdly revelatory.

I missed my end-of-year sunset photo for the first time in years and years. The whole world has just felt so bizarrely abstract and far off, while I'm laboring under the financial sword of Damocles which is coming soon. I guess I should back up and pick up where I posted to last.

In October I also did not get the next job, not because I bombed the interview, but because they wanted desperately to hire me but needed to be able to make the case to the Board, and needed someone who could just write shitty content until then. The hiring manager literally devoted a 45 minute zoom call to talking to me about it, and telling me that they would be calling me back "in a year". (I mean, it's nice to think so, but so many things change in a year.)

I took a weekend to grieve, breathe, lick my wounds, and recover, and then reached out to the recruiter for the place that had two different writer roles. She wrote back that they'd just had the senior tech writer accept an offer, but that she'd put me in for the staff tech writer role. Whoa, okay. I figured after bombing some of the others, there'd be no way this would be a fit but I'd give it a shot anyway. After talking with a few folks, I was surprised to get, not a writing exercise, but a strategy presentation exercise. I was more surprised to find that, while I wrote my slide deck, I could absolutely answer all these questions because I had done these things twice before. I literally put a "not my first rodeo" slide into the deck. And when I gave the presentation, I managed to get it to 15 minutes and 8 seconds, including having to pick up an interrupty Luna halfway through the preso and continue for a minute or two with her on my shoulder. My final round interview with my now-boss was interrupted by my phone telling me to duck and cover, and a small earthquake. 

It was an absolute home-run. I had an offer in hand, negotiated my start date, and set up benefits.

I was completely gobsmacked. The stuff that I'd been doing for so long at Segment, and which I'd been consistently told I wasn't quite meeting "senior" writer expectations on, is staff writer territory and wow, here I am doing it. I held off my start date for an extra month so we could get "done" with the foundation work and moved back in on Nov 20th.

We were not finished on the 20th. The house shit has been a nightmare since halfway through, and one of increasingly dire complexity. We have about $50k in outstanding bills to pay and I have about $40k left in all my liquid accounts. I put our property taxes on my credit card because I needed to make sure I could pay other bills if they came due in December. It seemed worth the fee to be able to get some breathing room there, but now it's January and I'm going to have to pay a tax underpayment bill, plus pay off all these credit cards.

And the house isn't done. The contractor who dicked us around so badly continued to dick us around, and we had to fight with him to get him to finish the work we'd already paid for. He spent a week trying to tell us that installing the doors and windows and trim wasn't included and hit us up for another $5k, which given that he also didn't reconnect our power, gas, or plumbing, was absolutely enraging. All of those things were explicitly called out in the absolutely extortionate change order he forced us to sign. And it all got mostly done just before it started raining, so we haven't had a chance to do more than prime nailheads - the windows and doors are in their bare-primed wood, most of the windows don't open, and the doors are bare fiberglass. Oh and the sunroom, which was jostled to the point of starting to fall down, is leaking water into the new work. The contractor's promise to get a crew up to seal up the siding came to absolute zero, and the shot siding and window casings all along the back of the house - that's five windows on two floors - are letting in water.

Did I mention we just had an atmospheric river, and that we're expecting another two or three in the next few weeks?

We moved back from the wretched apartment on Market st on Nov 18th, and we moved in to a house with only cold water, and only in the upstairs bathroom. We got hot water and heat the next day and it was a blessing. The plumber spent weeks dicking around finishing his work and we finally had water to all places on Dec 4th, and then he hit us up for another $900 above the $15k already paid, which we don't have. The electrician, who has been difficult to get ahold of but very understanding, invoiced us a $3k for the reconnection work, to be paid "some time in January". The heater folks haven't been back since we moved in, except to check the waterproofing on the new flue, and told me with a wink that we should "pay when the job is done" and not before, and when I asked about a payment plan, shrugged and said "sure". 

And now the walls are bowing around the windows and water is coming in and we're worried that the new wood windows we put in are getting ruined by all this rain and and and ::pant::

It's been a lot. I actually had my first ever episode of something like an anxiety-night-terror, where I fell into a spiral of self-recrimination at 1 in the morning, and some time around 2 started crying so hard I woke Martin up and he comforted me back to sleep.  So on the one hand everything feels numb and surreal and far away, like maybe I'm taking too many antidepressants, but also those drugs are working their helpful-little-molecule butts off and I am grateful to have them.

It's been an atmospheric river situation and I don't know a single person who hasn't had *some* sort of water problem, so I'm grateful for the strong foundation and the concrete keeping the water out, and the fresh new drains that we've installed to take rainwater away. I'm also trying to make my peace with the fact that we've failed to keep out the water - but also that this isn't *new* water damage happening, it's just more visible without the plaster and stager's white paint. The house is still standing.

Hello 2023, may you be less stressful than 2022.