Sometimes I blog to document the What Was I Thinking? aspect of things I do, because somehow every step seems to make sense on its own at the time, but this question always arises later. So let’s try to reconstruct the reasoning that led to this mess of a day.

1. I was looking for an Eckschrank (um, like, a corner cupboard. But big.) to store bed linens and towels for when I run an AirBnB. I don’t know why I’m so stuck on this plan, everyone who knows me is heavingly skeptical, but it just doesn’t go away. So anyway. Eckschrank. Linens. Real actual wood, not particle board. So, used. Ebay!
2. I bid on a couple, but failed. I also bid very low on two other schranks that I just liked the look of, and would need to be picked up just south of Munich. I didn’t think I’d win the auctions, but literally no one else bid on them, so I got them for €1 each. But I would have to pick them up. I asked around, concluded I would have to rent a van from Sixt, checked it out, and the day rate is only €20! Well that’s manageable.
3. ThingTwo and I went to the place on Saturday with the Twingo to pick up some smaller items that I’d also bought from the same guy, and to take some measurements. Because it turned out to be possible, we disassembled one schrank, and at least took the glass doors off the other – more was not possible, but at least the doors wouldn’t swing open or break. We brought the shelves home, along with the smaller items.
4. Today was the day to rent the van and pick up the two schrank shells. We arrived either slightly late or very early, depends how you look at it – 11.35, when I’d said 11.00, but apparently I’d reserved it for next Wednesday. The 20th. Oops. They did find one we could use but it had to be back by four. No problem, we foolishly thought. Okay, it shouldn’t have been a problem, but the schranks were heavier than we anticipated, and also Someone is a bit of a drama queen, although he is awesome in many other ways.
5. So we got to the house and when I say we, I mean I drove, but ThingTwo had to interpret the nav for me and also remember how to get there because I was a clueless mess. This will be important later. We got there, parked in the alley, started loading stuff in, until another van arrived that needed to get through and we hadn’t left enough clearance. So ThingTwo told me to just drive around the block, while he brought up more boards. And of course without him I got lost and confused, just driving around the damn block. Eventually I got re-oriented, went past the right street and had to turn around in the garage-plaza thing that had a bus shelter on it, which drew a MASSIVE DEEP SCRAPEY GROOVE in the upper driver-side wall of the van when I drove past it too close.
6. So, two lovely old wooden wardrobes for €1 each, plus €21 van rental, plus GIANT FUCKING GROOVE IN THE VAN will probably equal hundreds of euros in damage. So much for saving money.
7. Also, I was late getting back to the rental place and I forgot my satnav in the van.

And what have we learned today?

No more renting vans. I gouged a big dent in this one. Last one, I involved it in an accident. The one before that, I forgot to gas up before I returned it and ended up paying a huge re-tanking fee plus the cost of the gas, it was like €165 in total. This looked like a way to save money, but it is not. Not the way I do it.

Why did I think I could do grown-up things? Because people keep telling me I can. And then I believe them and I try and shit like this happens.

I wonder if it’s too late to join a convent.

Someone else’s has, though.

Sorry, still haven’t figured out about cropping yet, but this is Hathor, coming down to sit in my office and… just sit. She bolts back up to her lair under the roof the second I move, but she can actually be in my presence without flipping out, as long as I don’t do literally anything. Also, I bought her a toy, and she goes nuts with it every night after she’s pretty sure I’m in bed to stay. It’s so soothing to listen to her zooming around on my ceiling as I drift off to sleep.

Also, she peed in my bed two nights running. That sure was fun. Still trying to figure out what I did that annoyed her.

As for the other two members of our household, Hekate does not appreciate the new stranger-kitty. Especially because it appears that the new stranger-kitty can kick her ass. I try to keep that from happening too often.

And Thing Two is just fine. He’s a gamer, has a lot of friends online, so his relationships haven’t suffered from the quarantine and he seems perfectly healthy and balanced. Clearly the control in our little experimental group of skittish, scatterbrained, traumatized foundlings.

Everything is too hard.

And this is the thing I just can’t seem to explain to Normals, or even depressed people who have gotten help: things that are as easy and automatic as breathing to you are insurmountable to me. Get a therapist? I can’t even get out of bed. I can’t face talking to strangers, even on the phone, so howbout I call a whole string of strangers and listen to them reject me? That’s what it was like in Heidelberg; here in rural Bavaria there is ONE therapist per willage – not a good fit for you? Too fuckin’ bad! I’m sure there are loads of therapists in Munich to call and be rejected by. And then one won’t reject me and I will win! The opportunity to have to drive to Munich every week, which, see above re getting out of bed.

See? Everything. Too hard.

Anyway, as promised: a tale of a cat.

For some reason, Thing Two and I decided we needed more cats. Well, for the reason that this house is huge with many delightful hidey-holes and a big field nearby, so basically kitty heaven. Anyway, I went to the shelter website and saw this little face:

I mean. How could you not? The ad said she was in a foster home, not at the shelter, and she would need some patience. I got patience, I thought. So we called, made an appointment, went to meet her. In the very room – on the very windowsill – where this photo was taken. The poor critter shook the whole time we were there – the closer we got, the more violently she shook. Thing Two was skeptical, but you can’t just show up and then be like, nah. I can’t, in any case.

So a week later we went and picked her up, took the carrier down to the basement, where the litter box was, and opened it. She flattened her body to the floor and badger-crawled into the backmost room, where the furnace is, and a bunch of boxes, and also, she discovered after a few days…

a hole. In the wall. There was a tall marble slab next to the hole, which, had we known, we would have put in front of the hole before we brought a strange cat in, but hindsight, 20/20, etc. We thought she might be stuck, but the crunchies and water we set out right by the hole disappeared, and we were pretty sure, though not absolutely sure, that Hekate hadn’t eaten them. I was still commuting to Heidelberg, so I just had to go and leave her. In the hole.

That was about when Thing Two decided we should name her Hathor. Because the god Hathor was a patroness of mining, and also motherhood – she’d been found with kittens who had all been adopted out, and her foster mom said she’d been a good mama. So okay. We gave it some time, and eventually I caught her under the basement stairs, having visited the litterbox, so I scuttled into the furnace room and hoicked that marble slab over the hole so she couldn’t get back in. ‘Bout 20 minutes later I hear an almighty CRASH, and rush back in? Yeah. The marble slab is in pieces. The cat is back in the hole. And I have to go back to Heidelberg.

The following weekend, I come home, and the hole seems just as dark but somehow less… furry. So I shine my phone’s flashlight in, and there is no cat. There is a mystery, however. I called in my mother-in-law, because she’s who we ask when we have cat-related questions, and she had all kinds of dire predictions. The hole is the end of a pipe, that goes vertical and then goes horizontal again and runs under the patio; we don’t know where it lets out. And Oma was all, she’s probably stuck, probably gonna die up there, if she hasn’t already, it’s going to stink soon, you’ll have to get the city in to excavate the back yard, that’s not gonna be cheap – agh. The only thing that kept me from flipping out was that I’d been hearing strange noises in the night, the sort you would attribute to a ghost if you didn’t know for a fact that there was a cat loose in the house somewhere. And Hekate sleeps on my legs, so I knew it wasn’t her.

So then we summoned Thing One, the family cat whisperer, and he looks all over the house and doesn’t find her. Until.

If you go up all the stairs in this house, you find my bedroom. In there is another, surprise flight of stairs, leading up to my office, which has a very slanted ceiling so only about 1/3 of the room is usable. In there, you’ll see a spiral staircase leading up to an even more unusable room, through a trapdoor. And the part of the wall above and beyond the trapdoor? Is not finished.

And for no reason that he could name, Thing One wandered up to my office, moseyed up that spiral staircase, turned around 180° and looked in that unfinished hole that nobody has ever given any thought before, and he spotted a furry black paw. So then I scurried up and spotted a furry black nose.

And that is how Basement Cat became Ceiling Cat. She’s still up there, between the ceiling and the roof. We’re still being patient.

Fin. For now.

And it’s also kinda why I haven’t written, though this month has not been entirely uneventful (hooo boy) – because if I have a computer that means I’m at work so I should be, ya know, working, or I’m buzzing around the house picking things up and putting them down somewhere else and then when I do finally sit down to my laptop I remember (again) that the wifi signal doesn’t reach all the way up to the attic. Seriously, every weekend so far this year I’ve been like, tappy tappy tap–“oh, right…shit.” I have composed many blog posts in my head while driving to and from Heidelberg, though, so if you want to get caught up, get telepathic! I’ll wait!

Yeah, no I won’t. I finally remembered to bring my work laptop with me (remembered when I was halfway down the “mountain”*, had to turn around and go back for it) to my AirBnB, not someone’s living room, and lo, it is 9pm and I have something to do!

*(A real mountain has snow on it year-round. This bish doesn’t even have snow on it right now. In February.)

The house is really taking shape! Another couch turned up while I wasn’t looking – the renters said they’d give me their old one when the new one they’d ordered finally arrived, and at some point while I was in HD they turned up unannounced and dragooned The Sniglet into helping them hoick it into the house, heh. I got some armchairs from this lady in Iffeldorf (yes it’s really called that) who was recently widowed and is moving back to Bruges so we had a nice commiserating moment of boy, not being married any more kinda sucks, doesn’t it, and I got this rickety country house-style table from a used everything store in Deggendorf (also its real name) and many Tiffany lamps and quirky little side tables and a sewing machine and whee this is fun! But you can’t call it retail therapy when I buy everything used, so neener. Despite the used-ness of it all and my supa-mad bargain-hunting skillz, Dr. Bob did have some questions about this month’s credit card bill. I told him don’t worry, the house can only hold so much furniture. I didn’t tell him how hard I’m planning to test that. He always said he liked surprises.

Where was I? Oh yes, lots of furniture, buried under lots of trash. I finally got the moving boxes all sorted and stored, and the pantry set up the way I want it, and last weekend the uh – winter garden, Germans call it, like a patio but glassed in? Anyway, all sorted and organized and ready for the vertical garden on the north wall, as soon as I figure out how to keep plants alive. My bedroom is perfect, except for about 18 moving boxes littered around the floor, some of them containing like two paperclips. Oh right, lots of clothes in there, that I couldn’t put in the closet because I’d run out of hangers but then I got more when I was in Deggendorf. Those are… in a box on the floor behind the new/old couch. Yeah, I should do something about that, but I’m 500 miles away. As I so often am when these revelations come.

But here is a true thing: Dorfen is good for me. I can feel myself getting sadder every time I come back to Heidelberg – downtown especially is a swamp of memories, might-have-beens, and regrets – and in Dorfen it’s so much easier to look ahead than look back. I actually felt happy yesterday, for the first time in probably over a year. It was brief but noticeable. And this is my last week here and then I can be there full time with my plans and my kid and my cats.

Oh yes. Cats. That’s a story for the next post.

And now it’s January. I no longer have the room in the shared house in Heidelberg, so I spend weekends in the Willage and Tuesday through Friday  – well, last week in an AirBnB, this week at a friend’s house in a suburb inconveniently far from work but whatever. There are buses. I got the brakes fixed on my bike. I can’t make or keep resolutions because I don’t have anything on which to build routines, but that’s temporary. I’m keeping my expectations of myself pretty low for now.

But I’m still here. That’s enough, for January.

And she says if I keep telling myself that story then there’s no point in therapy and I need to tie all these events together with a different story and she can think of a million other explanations (thus implying that surely I can come up with one), and then I feel like I’m in a guessing game and I get annoyed. I hate guessing games. The worst thing about being a kid was grown-ups were always asking me questions that they already knew the answers to.

Another part of my story is that my husband and this woman did a terrible thing to me, but everybody is so quick to forgive them that I start to think maybe it wasn’t so terrible. If they’re basically good people who did the right thing, then where does that leave me? Did I deserve this, because it takes two to wreck a marriage and all that?

And it’s wrong to say they stole my future because it wasn’t my future, nothing is promised, I supported his career of my own free will and he doesn’t owe me anything. And if I cling to this narrative that I’ve been done wrong then I’m trapped in a victim mentality and not taking responsibility for my emotions and I’ll never be able to move on. To move on I have to accept and believe that my understanding of everything thus far has been wrong, but if that’s true then how can I trust my own judgement? And if I can’t trust my own judgement how can I make any decisions? And then I’m paralyzed and I can’t move forward. And I’ve just never been great at improv or brainstorming or just thinking up stuff so I’m trying to come up with a new story but the task is just too abstract; I don’t know where to start since there’s nothing tangible I can do.

So yeah. I’m flunking therapy. God I fucking hate December.

I’ve been on an eBay binge for awhile, gathering used furniture for the house. So now the front entry is done – already had the shoe shelf and a hatrack, now there is also a coat rack and a bench to sit on while you put on your shoes. I still need to get a buncha little mirrors, but it already looks like a real room – in contrast to the other rooms, which feature stacks of boxes, a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and/or pieces of furniture waiting to be assembled. But the first part of the house you see is done, and that’s something.

December is a bad month for depression. It has always been really rough for me, and in past years I’ve gone hard on the manufactured cheer of the Christmas season just to keep myself from going under. Organizing presents for everyone from everyone because nobody else would take responsibility, and filling the house with sparkle and light despite my husband and sons’ sneering cynicism was almost more work than it was worth, but I did it anyway. But this year it’s all I can do to hold on. Just gonna grit my teeth and get through this.

Thing1 said on the drive that he noticed his father had been unhappier over the last two years. I didn’t notice that at all. I mean I knew we had problems and I had a plan for addressing them and I know I waited too long, but also, I didn’t even realize that it had recently gotten visibly worse. I’ve always been sorta clueless about that sort of thing (if you went to high school with me you are now doing a spit-take and saying, “SORTA!?”), so it’s maybe not surprising that I missed it, but maybe if I had noticed, I could have done something about it. Or at least had some warning, so I could brace myself. Then maybe I wouldn’t still be shaking my head in disbelief after nearly eight freaking months.

So yeah. Dark thoughts. Grit teeth. Hold on.

Friends seem surprised that I’m still sad, which makes me feel dumb, so I’m trying not to talk about it. But I’m still really sad. Not dewy melancholy staring through a rainy window like in the movies sad, but ugly-crying and wishing I’d died before any of this could happen sad. Other things are happening which I can’t talk about because of other people’s privacy, but it’s all got me feeling quite hopeless. I’m not a lot of fun to be around lately.

Huaugh. Maybe it’s a good thing that I forgot about the blog for a bit. #DebbieDowner

But also very busy! But is that just a way to distract myself from the sad? But it’s good to distract yourself in the early stages because you’re too wounded to look directly at the pain, you’ll spiral. But it’s bad to distract yourself for too long because the grief is gonna sneak up and getcha at some point when you’re least expecting it! Aw hell, I don’t know.

And then in the middle of all this Mr. Husband texted me a buncha fightin’ words and I decided to wait a few days before responding because I was mad-mad but I didn’t want to escalate, and then today he had to tell me about some tax thing and he was calmer and less of a dickbag and so now I have all this anger and nowhere to put it. I can’t really go into detail because of other people’s privacy but it’s been a bit of a roller coaster. But just a small one, the kind you see at the fair that’s run by a dude in a ladybug costume, you don’t even have to be this tall to ride. I guess that’s an improvement.

Still singing All At Once by Whitney Houston, though. Yeah he’s a moron, but he was my moron.