I just can't cut a break.
My younger brother arrived home last evening no earlier than 8:50 p.m. from wherever it was that he was drinking. Technically, that was ahead of the 9:00 p.m. deadline that I have for him which he knows nothing of, for anytime from 9:00 p.m. on is very unlikely to find him in any shape to watch our television shows with.
We do so through a T9 Android 8.1 TV Box of which I am the sole operator.
So yes, he made it home ahead of 9:00 p.m., but I judged from his loud breathing and exhalations as he took off his coat and footwear at the front door that he was probably sloshed. Thus, I decided not to gamble on him.
I was probably in bed by 9:00 p.m., or very soon after.
I don't know why I was so keyed up ─ perhaps a combination of my late supper and guilt over abandoning my brother, for I began reflecting that at my age of 70 and his of 67, for one reason or another we may not even have another decade of life to share with each other.
However, if he was indeed hammered, then what is present of him is not any brother I want to spend time with. But what if he was not as bad off as I feared?
I suspect that shortly after 9:30 p.m. I might have begun descending into a state of superficial sleep, but I pulled out of it and when I next checked the time, it was about 10:00 p.m.
I was just waiting for my brother to go to bed so that I could rise and put some work into the post that I opened up yesterday at one of my six hosted websites. He does not typically go to bed before midnight.
Well, I remained wide awake until midnight ─ in other words, for the next two hours. Heck, as I waited during the midnight hour, I even got up and performed a five-minute and 32-second plank.
Most pleasantly, when I returned to bed after that exertion, I felt at peace and honestly believed that I might have thereafter been able to find sleep at last, but it was now too late.
He did not finally retire to his bedroom until 12:48 a.m. Only then did I rise after a frustratingly long and fruitless evening in bed.
I put in the work I wanted to do as a minimum on the website, and returned to bed at just about 4:00 a.m., I think.
It seemed like I was awake for periods at least equal to the length of the mini-naps I thereafter managed to rack up. However, I remained abed until a little after 8:30 a.m. And as it happened, I opened my bedroom door just as my brother opened his own to go downstairs to watch T.V. and drink coffee.
I sat here at my computer upstairs until just ahead of 10:00 a.m., then I went downstairs to join him, finally putting out Android TV Box to use. I wanted to lead things off with a YouTube documentary that I was curious about, so I used the YouTube 'app' that I have downloaded into our Android TV Box and retrieved DuPont vs. the World: Chemical Giant Covered Up Health Risks of Teflon Contamination Across Globe.
It ran for around a half hour, and I was pleased that my brother paid attention to it, clearly interested.
We watched more typical T.V. fare thereafter until near the end of the noon hour, and then my brother returned to his bedroom to seek some more rest before he would be heading away to start drinking somewhere again.
I wanted to eat a little before seeking my own nap, or I would probably be too hungry and enfeebled for the exercising I wanted to do later.
And so it was just after 2:00 p.m. when I was into bed.
It took awhile, but eventually I began to fade towards a needed nap...when I became aware that my wife had entered the bedroom. She was home after leaving toward the end of last Friday afternoon (she tends to spend her weekends somewhere in Vancouver ─ such is my sorry marriage).
I knew that she had to work today at the Thai restaurant that employs her, but she recently became part-time there. Apparently she was not going to leave for work until it was time for the restaurant's 4:30 p.m. afternoon opening (it closes daily from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.).
We live far nearer to the restaurant than is Vancouver.
A nap and the chance to settle my meal was now impossible, so I rose. I think she eventually showered, and she may even have done a little cooking. She seemed to be arguing with first one of her sons, and then with the other soon thereafter. I don't know any Thai ─ I'm just surmising by the volume and pace of the two separate conversations that all was not joy.
I was standing in the living room staring out the window when she finally headed out to her car to leave for work ─ it was maybe 4:02 p.m. Even though she had to walk within a dozen feet of me to get to the front door, she said not a word as she departed. In fact, she never advanced any communication to me whatsoever in the time she was home.
Such is my sorry marriage.
Perhaps I will seek a nap towards dark, and risk that my brother will be in decent condition by the time he arrives home this evening. If we watch T.V. together, it will be into the midnight hour.
Saturday was my wife's 47th birthday, and I got her nothing. I was too broke, thanks to the enormous debt I have allowed her to plunge us into.
However, her eldest son (25 years old) treated his mother, brother, and I to a meal of sushi Friday afternoon around 4:30 p.m. at Maguro Japanese Restaurant (Google map) in Guildford here in Surrey.
Google Photos today notified me of the following animation that it created from a few of the photos that were taken ─ the subjects in the animation are my wife and her two sons ─ the youngest is at the right, and he is 22 years old:
I don't know why, but Google Photos also created two collages ─ and they are identical. I am posting them both regardless ─ you can see my shaven head in the background:
I have absolutely no doubt that my wife had lots of celebrating to do with the many partying friends she knows, so my inability to get her anything for her birthday for the very first time since marrying her in 2005 is no cause for too much concern. I know I was not missed, at any rate.
Google Photos was quite busy today, for it also created a collage from some photos I took seven years ago (2013):
The photos were taken during a walk of reminiscence I experienced ─ and it most likely was on February 24 in 2013 because that day was a Sunday. I don't like going anywhere during the week because its all too damned busy hereabouts for my liking; and since I do not drive, I have to walk.
Those railway tracks were always known to me as the BC Hydro Railway, and I have probably spent a good deal of my life on them. I would have likely first set foot on them as a seven-year-old boy in 1957, for we lived near to them, and I had to cross over them on my way to school and back home afterward.
Anyway, this particular stretch in the photos lies between Nordel Way (Google map) and 128th Street (Google map). I did one heck of a lot of drinking along that stretch of tracks over the years, very often with my dear late friend Larry Ernest Blue.
When I took the photos, I was walking from 128th Street toward Nordel Way, and that latter was the direction in which I was facing when I took the top two photos in the collage.
Here are the four original photos:
Reminiscing takes a lot out of me ─ as does reflecting upon my shallow, pointless, and disappointing daily life in the present. So I do believe that I am done with today's post as of here.
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