Author: Matthew Groff

  • New Stress

    I have been gone for some time, and the reason is that life has become a little difficult.

    Mainly, my wife lost her job. She was laid off the week we returned home after being evacuated for the wildfires, so that was a particularly awful week. We have been dealing with it.

    It has made us face some of the very harsh realities of living in California. Unfortunately, we aren’t in a position where we can get by unless we are both working. They gave her a little severance, which has made things easier, or at least manageable, to get through the Holidays.

    What this feels like is that we have been under constant stress for a solid month now. First, the thought of losing everything we owned, then being faced with the fact that we don’t have a support system in the place where we live. It made us feel very isolated, and that feeling has been shucked off still. With her job gone, and that was one of the big reasons we moved here, it has created a “come to Jesus” moment for us; why are we here, and is this really what we want to be doing?

    It has been a month where we have been fighting more than normal. Nothing serious, but we have increased the frequency that we pick and nag each other. I even noticed that the kid has also started acting up, when she would never do that before. The stress has affected and infected all of us.

  • I Need a Minute

    I am looking forward to the three-day weekend. Not just for the normal reasons, but also to have three days to get life back to normal.

    We have been running from place to place the day after Halloween. The 31st was the last day we had where we didn’t have to run errands or make some sort of arrangements. That was the day we could just focus on the kid, and make sure she had a good day. We couldn’t have pulled it off without our friends in LA, and they truly made it a memorable experience for the kid.

    Then we had to run to Texas for a planned family trip, and though it is great to see our families, it was still running, running, and more running.

    On Monday, we flew into LA where I got our car and cat and drove back home, while the wife and kid took a flight home. Their job was to get the apartment back in shape, as we had a fridge full of rotted food, a half carved pumpkin left on the kitchen counter.

    I spent 6 hours driving up the Central Valley working my way back to the Bay Area. The cat cried nonstop for two hours, which in turn caused me to turn Led Zeppelin up even louder. That honestly was the last time I got to relax, sort of. Driving and singing along to music that I really haven’t listened to in a long time.

    On Tuesday, we all went back to work and school, like nothing had happened.

  • Evacuation

    (*Note: This was written on 11/1/19)

    I have been through a few natural disasters. The first one was an ice storm that hit Birmingham, Alabama when I was a kid. My mother was trying to get me, my brothers, and some other kids from the neighborhood home from school when the storm hit, and we got trapped on the highway. I was five years old, and for me, it just seemed like we were on an adventure. I found out years later that is was a terrifying experience for my mother, who was afraid that she would cause the death of her and these other kids. We had to abandon the car, and my mother was able to get a ride home for all of us with a big rig tow truck driver.

    Then, the next major disaster was sitting through two hurricanes that sideswiped New York City. Sandy was the worse of the two, and I clearly remember the wind howling as the gusts cause our five-story walk up to sway. There was a fast second of thinking that our building would collapse. In the end, our life was back to normal in two days, and we never lost power.

    Then the Kincade fire started, and it was only 20 miles from our apartment in Santa Rosa. There was a twinge of nervousness about it, but honestly, it was far enough away that it couldn’t get to us quickly.

    Then PG&E cut our power in the evening after we had been notified that we wouldn’t lose power.

    Not good.

    Next the wife and I had an awful night of sleep of getting a notice, of what seemed like every hour, notifying us that neighborhood after neighborhood was being ordered evacuated. It was like watching dominos slowly falling in succession, leading to the investable notice that it was our turn to pick up and run.

    It came at 6am.

    We packed in the dark, and woke the kid up, telling her that we were going to be on an adventure to see our friends in Los Angeles. (All my life is a circle, as one might say)

    The feeling of adventure, and excitement of the challenge of survival was completely gone, as now my only thought was about trying to get the kid out of danger, and also not scare her.

    She’s been rolling with all of it, but I know that it might be several years before I will know what affect this has had.

  • Honest Realization

    (*Note: This was written on 11/1/19)

    This has been a very difficult week for us.

    I had no idea how paralyzing the feeling of helplessness would be when it looked like we might lose everything in a wildfire.

    The move to California, which happed a year ago now, has been a huge challenge for us, and I think we are both coming to the conclusion that it might not be the right fit.

    I have contemplated, and I keep wondering if it is the passing of Ma, and the depression that has followed, which is making it hard for me to accept the new situation we are in? I don’t feel happy, and I am just sad all the time. Is that her death affecting me, or is it that we live in a place where I cannot accomplish the things that I want to do?

    Deb coming home every night, just vomiting the hate that she has for her place of work, hasn’t help anyone. We both hate our jobs, but seemed to be trapped in them. We got into so much debt on the move out here, and with me being unemployed for three months, only made everything worse. We went from $40k in debt, to $80k in the space of 6 months. There is such a burden on us, that we can’t really see a way out of it.

    And then the fires hit, and luckily, we had a place to go, even though it was all the way down in Los Angeles. As we tried to land for a few days and plot our recovery, we started wondering if maybe, just maybe, if the fires went through town and torched our jobs and home, that we could pick up and return to New York. Wouldn’t that be funny?

    What was funny, was how excited it made us to think that we could return to New York.

    That’s when we knew we really were in trouble.

    We weren’t enjoying living in California. The move hadn’t made us happy, and now we were half a world away from our friends and family. But we also had to admit to ourselves that we were stuck, and couldn’t pick up and go.

    Yet, that is exactly what we want to do.

  • The Little Things that Make the Difference

    It is closing in on a year that I have lived in California. Specifically, in the North Bay area. It is pretty here, and the people are nice, but I am still getting used to the differences.

    Air Conditioning: Mainly, not a lot of people have it, and don’t get me wrong, I understand why. It’s only three months out of the year that you might need it, and that would be about half of the days. What makes it weird is that Summer is July, August and September. October started to feel like fall, but even this week, we got hit with a heat wave in the 90’s. As I have been told, this is not normal, need A/C in late October, but as you will see, that phrase has been a theme.

    Rain: It’s pretty much all or nothing around here. We are in late October, and it should be raining, but it’s not. We should average 5 days of rain… We’ve had one. The rain makes everything green, and washes away the dirt and the pollen. But this is not a normal year.

    Power outages/Wildfires: So, the power company cuts off the power when it gets too windy. I understand why. It’s just that I feel like that as a modern society, we should be able to better handle fires, other than a blanket power shut off. As I write this, the Kincade Fire is burning 20 miles north of us, and I can smell the smoke. What makes this weirder is that where the fire started, that area didn’t have power. Shutting off power is new, and not normal.

    Now, I am 30 minutes from the beach, and 20 minutes from a huge Redwood rainforest. That’s pretty cool. I’m just getting used to it all.