The State of the writer

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This past week was scheduled for over six months for a visit by my assistant, who lives across the country. We were going to go over several ongoing editing projects, better handled in person, firm up a schedule for the rest of the year, as I’ve been merrily forgetting/running over deadlines at such a speed she can’t keep up with me, and arrange for her to coordinate a website design/shop design with my web person.

For this purpose, she was going to stay in our basement guest room for a week, and we’d have plenty of time to work, even taking in account that I was trying to do the last 10k words of the very long book.

About twelve hours after she arrived, I discovered there was a huge, confused, bureaucratic snarl involving documents needed for #2 son’s religious wedding to take place in Portugal in October: meaning they were demanding a document that I’m fairly sure they don’t need for reasons that are not applicable, but since the bureaucracy there moves at the speed of glaciation, I tried to get the document they might remotely need (they can’t have the one they asked for, since son is NOT a Portuguese citizen nor am I) and ran into the fact that the representation for Portugal in the US is widespread and beyond bizarre.

Since one of the main reasons I give thanks every morning when I wake up and I’m not a Portuguese citizen is the bizarrely convoluted bureaucracy that has been worsening since the Roman Empire, if not before, my blood pressure shot up to three million over five hundred thousand (these are approximations, it might be higher) multiplying as I met each obstacle to obtaining something very simple. Each step tried to convince me to get the document the Portuguese side think they need, which is actually impossible since neither of the parties to the wedding are Portuguese citizens.

On top of which I’m VERY BAD, bordering on mentally deficient when dealing with bureaucracy of ANY KIND and my response to frustration when dealing with bureaucrats is to roll twenty for angry snark. (Which does not go well in Latin cultures.)

If at this point you have an image of me sitting in front of the computer with a little cartoon chimney protruding from my head and steam whistling out, it would be accurate, yes.

Pray for me, as that situation is ongoing.

After about six hours of this, plus trying to explain to the Portuguese side — via my mother who is 90 and VERY stubborn — that we can’t actually register the legal marriage in Portugal since neither of these people are registered in Portugal and the process for them to marry legally there (legal and religious are completely separate) will take multiple years, and is pointless since they DON’T LIVE THERE. (The process will probably necessitate their living there for some time, at that.). Also reminding mom that neither my marriage, nor that of my older son were registered in Portugal, despite which we could have a religious ceremony there all the same — I decided we probably should eat.

And because I had completely forgotten to shop, I went to the basement, which had been fine in the morning, to get food from the freezers.

At which point, at the bottom of the stairs, my feet went splish-splosh. Note that I was so out of it I went five steps before going “that sound is WRONG” and looking down…. at two inches of water. At that point I was in the FINISHED part of the basement where the guest room, electronics and musical instruments are….

Run up the stairs screaming “We have a water leak.”

Well, I was wrong. The fact is we had a massive storm go through, and what we actually had was a raw sewage backup.

Thanks to husband’s precaution of putting everything in the basement on platforms, everything but possibly ONE eiderdown and cover and a Christmas tree are PROBABLY salvageable/okay.

Call the insurance company, who sent over a mitigation company who, for reasons inexplicable, decided WE must be the ones to carry everything stored down there up the stairs (while I’m fairly mobile and fine health wise, Dan’s knees are shot, which means bringing up EVERYTHING from food storage to appliances to empty computer boxes from the storage area would take me, even with my assistant’s help about two weeks. All the while walking on raw sewage, which, btw, for some reason started my asthma going. The company meanwhile, was enthusiastically removing flooring and padding, and wanted to proceed well beyond the area of flooding, and also wanted to CUT OUT DRY WALL, despite the wall not starting until well above the flood. Oh, and they wanted to empty the basement despite the fact that most storage is on elevated impermeable shelves.

Husband got very upset and called insurance again. As of right now, the basement is clean and disinfected and drying, pending environmental testing, and getting a company in to re-floor the damaged area. Also pending is getting in a plumber to make sure this backup doesn’t happen again. (Among other things we found we had some kind of a sewer access down there we didn’t know existed, until the cap popped off under pressure. This wasn’t mentioned in our inspection; it was under a set of shelves. We had no idea it even existed. The other access was thoroughly roto-rooted, but the source of the backup was outside our property. I don’t know what to even do with that. And please don’t tell me. Tell my husband. I’m already dealing with ONE insane bureaucracy.)

Meanwhile about a hundred minor things seem to also have decided to go critical all at once, to the point I’m answering the phone with “What fresh hell is this?”

At least we seem to have pulled Havelock cat from kidney failure brink. He’s been letting us hydrate him, and is doing well, if thoroughly put out with my locking him up in the office randomly (from his perspective. Actually so hoses/vents can be run up through open doors from the basement.)

Since the Portuguese bureaucracy will shut down in an hour and a half and my assistant HAS to leave in the next couple of hours, I will be trying to sit down and finish the book shortly. Even if I don’t have any hair left.

Pray for what remains of my sanity. Even if you’re an atheist. The novelty might be enough to get the Author’s attention, or at least cause Him to laugh.

I need three days or so to finish this book and maybe catch my breath, before returning to the struggle, which is very definitely real.

84 thoughts on “The State of the writer”

  3. Prayer sent…

    Just hang tough and work on that ‘one bite of the elephant’ thing. If necessary for every minute or hour. You’ve got tons of support out here sending you “good vibes” and we’re also willing to help but really can’t do much on a remote basis.

    Please take care of yourself, Dan, the rest of the family and the cats too! If there is something your loyal readers can do – just ask. Also, don’t worry about the blog just drop in a single sentence to let us know you’re still kicking and we can wait whatever time is needed for another post.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Hang in there. Despite appearances, neither the basement cleanup nor the bureaucratic stupidity is a deadly threat. Perhaps a threat to sanity, but just living on the current timeline is a threat to sanity.

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  5. Prayers and care sent. Remember to stop and take a deep breath once in a while.

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      1. I’m pretty sure you’re approaching some sort of special relativity horizon.

        I’m glad the hear the damage was relatively minor. When something similar happened to me about six years ago, I lost most of my library.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. That’s some consolation, anyway. Try to not raise too much lethal havoc on any bureaucrats; it just gets you talked about. And keep what remains of your sanity as intact as possible; things will get better.👍👍

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  7. I’d try to make you feel better, but my tolerance for people who spend their lives shopping for hoops to make you jump through is probably much lower than yours.

    So I wish you strength, and the interest-free loan of patience from whatever saint you can find. And that one day we will have the pleasure of watching these Tormenters For The Public Good suffer an appropriate punishment. Niven and Pournelle suggested having them fill out their clay tablet retirement papers before the clay dries in the heat of hell. That sounds like a good start.

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    1. Rumor has it that the bureaucrat in question had managed complete his retirement “paperwork” at least once but the demonic bureaucracy had changed the requirements before his submitted it. 😈😈😈😈😈😈😈

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Looks like my copy of Inferno was paperback. Might be time for a Kindle copy. I rather loved the bit about the “Bay of Hammurabi”. There was a lot of really good snark in that book. Also liked the sequel, though I don’t recall much snark. That one is on the shelf. One of these days…

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        1. Beautiful!!! I don’t know where you found it, but I now have a copy, courtesy of 4k Video Downloader. I may send it (anonymously, of course) to the MD DMV, in token of the months I spent there a couple of days, if I can find an email address for one of the managers. :twisted:

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      3. “Well it looks like everything is in order, but this is last year’s Form 7734-2-09, so you’ll have to go back and get them to sign the new one instead.”

        (For added fun, type in the form number on a school calculator, without the dashes. It doesn’t add up to 5,318,008, either.)

        Saying a prayer for the Hoyts.

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          1. I don’t know about Spock, but if the 9 flips to a G and the 2 is read as an ablative preposition, it should give GPS directions for the bureaucrats in question…

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  8. Sheesh. Chocolate and perhaps 5 minutes with a cool cloth on your forehead.

    I know, you’re coping as fast as you can.

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  9. Blink. There is legal bureaucracy related to a religious ceremony for couples already legally married by legal civil authority in their legal home country, where the religious ceremony, near as I can tell, doesn’t actually “count”, except to the participants? WTH?

    Um. Keep using the blog for ranting. It is educational and you can get it out of your system.

    Oh, prayer wheel is running.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Well, it counts for the religious authority, but it still …. the problem is that they think they need to be legally married there too, because they think they have dual citizenship. ARGH

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      1. It sounds like their mindset is locked into “why would anyone have a religious marriage ceremony in Portugal and not be having the marriage registered as a legal marriage in Portugal” in genuine “but this goes to 11” brain-locked mode. The bureaucrats can’s simply conceive that a couple would want to celebrate a religious ceremony in Portugal for family over there without it being legally recognized there. I.E. bureaucracy in a nutshell.

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      2. Laws are weird. It may be (I dunno) that by Portuguese law your son does have dual citizenship. That could have been an issue for me if I’d visited France after I was old enough to be drafted; my father was naturalized when I was about 8, but I was told that made no difference, and by French law I had dual citizenship by virtue of having been born before his naturalization. The fact that the US doesn’t recognize dual citizenship was apparently irrelevant. Like I said, weird.😒

        But I suspect your issue is just a bureaucratic goat rope; they generate them in droves.

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        1. Nah. He could have for the claiming, same as I could. But I didn’t claim it for them. Or self. My citizenship ceremony said to mail back my passport to Portugal. So I did.

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            1. I know of at least 2 US/Canadian dual citizenship. Doesn’t make getting their inheritance out of Canada any easier. Don’t know if old boss kept his Netherlands citizenship after getting his US citizenship, or not, at age 70. The reason he finally pursued his US citizenship, wasn’t the problems he had when getting on the wrong ferry from *San Juan Islands in Washington to the mainland ports and he didn’t have his green card or passport with him. It was because he and his wife met with financial planners on what inheritance tax as a non-citizen and the Netherlands were going to do to the estate. Don’t know the specifics, but “ouch” applies.

              (*) There are ones that come from Canada, which require going through border control. Those calls were always interesting. Used to leave phone on speaker, and we used yell to unofficial office managers (wife or SIL, depending on who was in, small business. Note, wife handled accounting, so really not a problem, but … funny anyway.) “Boss is stuck at border control again. I’d like to get paid this week, please get him out.” Got a chuckle out of border control a few times. Did have one time where neither was in so got the questions.

              “Does A work here?” Yes.

              “What does he do?” He is the owner. He writes our paychecks. (You’d think this would be enough, but noooo.)

              Pause.

              A lot of questions later …

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  12. Thanks for the chuckle. Good luck with your sewer pipes. Next week I could try to explain my wife’s struggles to you, by which point they will have become out of sight enough to be funny, perhaps even to her. Basically, perfectionist who won’t off-load work enough. Well, I did print out her Vacation Bible School certificates for her at work (which had its own small blunders on my part—double-sided certificates are not proper, even for brothers, me thinks). Company is fine as long as I pay for it.

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      2. The Reader offers that we appreciate the trust implicit in your venting here. And if you can share a little of your burden, we are willing to help.

        Liked by 1 person

  14. Dealing with insane bureaucracies? The question must be asked: are there sane bureaucracies? Perhaps some young ones, where the Iron Rule has not had very much time to march forward, or perhaps a few others by sheer law of averages. (Even ridiculously unlikely events become almost inevitable if you have enough of them. Monkeys on typewriters and all that, and goodness known there are enough bureaucracies in the world monkeying around.)

    Endure, if only to make certain bureaucrats sorry they ever heard your name. As for prayer having novelty value … less so with this metatheist than before, for very odd reasons. Maybe your name will serve as a fresh novelty.

    Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

    P.S. Congrats on almost having the book done. Don’t stop at the ribbon: run through the finish line.

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  15. I have nothing helpful to suggest, but that sounds ghastly and I deeply sympathize. I hope your troubles will grow smaller.

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  16. Prayers for thing to get un-upgefuked, Prayers to give you patience. Prayers for Havelock-cat. And lastly, prayers for you, and Dan, and the soon to be newlyweds. (Already are newlyweds?)

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  18. Adding to the daily prayer I already say for you.

    Between you and Dave, I think maybe Crowley (Supernatural) had it right when he took over He’ll. A long, long, unmoving queue in a bureaucracy

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  20. When our problems get us frazzled, just think how frazzled we would be if we didn’t have all the good things that cause them: family, home, etc. they can be taken so quickly. Yet either way we can still live in the Goodness of God.
    Sarah, you have given light and hope to us over the years, my prayer for you is more “joy in the journey” to add to what you already have and know.

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      1. “This too shall pass,” Fr. Pax, then then-headmaster, intoned. Under his breath, he added, “Like a kidney stone, perhaps, but it shall pass.”

        The rest of us pretended deafness as we silently yelled, “No kidding, sir!” (It ended better than we had hoped at the start, but oh, the getting there …)

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  21. i hope no synthesizers were harmed in the flood.

    Musical instruments was something Dan and i never got to chat about at LC. Maybe next time.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Nothing was harmed. Most of the musical instruments were younger DIL’s including her specially crafted harp. Fortunately those were atop plastic bins. So other than cleaning the bottom of the bins, we’re fine.

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  23. So nice that your Husband knew, from experience, that rooms below ground level can flood if conditions are right, and thus he knew to raise everything up. At least one bright candle in the mix of problems!

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  24. Thanks for proving that while I am a fast reader, I think even faster. I read, “Well, I was wrong,” and thought, oh good, a happy ending.

    That thought didn’t last long.

    My usual prayer is “my previous statement was neither a request nor a challenge.” I’ve made an exception because this sound like hell. Best of luck.

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  25. On the plus side, you have an opening ‘hook’ for another book going roughly “As I stepped into water at the bottom of the stairs….”

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    1. I stepped off the basement stairs with an unexpected splash.

      It wasn’t water.

      ….

      Sounds like an intro to a Noir Horror.

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    2. Is there a need for this to be formally legal there?

      If not, bribe some suitable cleric to put on a “demonstration for authorial purposes”, for that book you are writing. Just now, sort of jotted down elevator pitch.

      Cheat.

      (grin)

      I sympathize with the flood of eau de poo. Mom’s basement flooded multiple times, the worst when our septic to leach field pipe clogged, then we had some major storms. Ack.

      We were broke. The mainline access port, no trap, for clean out and rooter use, blew out its cap and ingested a -mop- during a minor flood. Then things got crappy.

      Local volunteer FD pumped it out. They had a decertified old pump on a near wore out small service truck (squad 51 type) that they used every spring as fundraiser and community service.

      very popular folks, they were….

      anyhoo…

      Getting the mop out of the end-of-driveway sewer pipe trap involved cutting off 2 inches at a time through the vent hole, then pulling the mophead put like a cork.

      Gusher of sewerage. Epic. Dodged. Flood of epic stench.

      Getting that pipe unplugged then resulted in discovering the leach field was clogged up from decades of use and neglect, and it quit when suddenly overwhelmed by draining septic backlog.

      argh… Mom nearly had a stroke when we got the estimate for a contractor to redo it. And then the backhoe quote arrived next day. Then the next day the county estimsted bill for “road work” as our line ran across the street.

      oy vey…

      We were broke, so pro work wasn’t happening. Would have required a mortgage on top of the one we had. Not possible.

      So I excavated it myself. By hand, with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow. At age 12. Dug it up. about 18 inches of dirt and clay over it, removed about six inches of creekstone cap rock (think walkway pavers), then stirred two feet of gravel. Diverted the road storm drain ditch to flood/flush the eccchh into the badly polluted creek adjacent. Stir more.

      Then put it all back.

      Did I mention the field was most of a quarter acre?

      It all worked out. The system worked another 20-odd years until mom moved out and sold the place.

      So I really do sympathize with your current pain. My shoulders and hands hurt just thinking about it.

      I can -smell- it.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. On a much lower level, we were having toilet issues.When my beloved and our son finally took the toilet apart and checked the pipe, they found a mid-sized pocket knife blocking it up. The weird part was nine of us recognized the pocket knife.

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    3. … I realized the water could not have come anywhere but from the portal I’d been warned was in the basement when we bought the house. We’d laughed it off as some sort of supernatural heebee jeebee meant to give us a fright or a thrill, and yet…now there was water, two inches deep at the bottom of the stairs in a basement that was supposed to have been flood-proof.

      Why, we even had a guarantee on paper to that effect.

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    4. “There was sewage in the basement and it wasn’t my fault. I don’t work spells in the basement for this very reason. But there I was, staring down the staircase at the rising tide of ‘oh please may it be water’ when a p!ssed-off nymph launched a drowning-in-desire charm at me.”

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  26. O-M-G. Sometimes it seems like disasters just come, all of a piece. On top of the auto accident which totaled poor Thing the Versa, I had notification almost at the same time – that the CPA office which I have been a client of for 30+years … hasn’t filed my income tax returns for the last three years. The original gentleman passed away, and his son took over the practice … and needless to say, I won’t be returning to them. Already working with another CPA to fix things – but Jeez Louise, is this year under a bad star already, or something?

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  29. Widow friend has ongoing problem with her primary sewer-line lift pump because the &$%$% who originally installed the line(that runs UPHILL from the house to the pump) couldn’t be bothered with putting in a bloody CHECK-VALVE in the line. So far the company has replaced 3 pumps, telling the owner that “it’s roots in the pump sump causing the a sewage backup back down the line and into her house”.

    Funny, only seems to happen after a heavy rain storm. . .AAAARRRGGH

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  30. Regarding the sewage blockage and flooding, if the blockage was on the city/municipal/private company that does the sewage then you and/or your insurance company should be able to get the sewage company to cough up some or all of the dough for fixing everything.

    Same with fresh water. It’s the company/supplier’s issue if it’s to the water meter.

    Same with gas.

    And electric, it’s your problem after the meter, but before and the meter itself, they have to fix it.

    Too bad the kids can’t have a civil ceremony here and then the religious ceremony there.

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      1. “No one who isn’t an X ever asks to do this. Therefore they must be X, even though their papers say they are not X. So we need the papers for X. Because they must be X, because no non-X ever asks to do this!”

        Bureaucrat logic. Even worse than computer logic, because sometimes you can debug the computer.

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  31. It’s just the universe trying to get you to clean again.

    Praying for sanity

    (We’ll see if this works/posts. WPDE has eaten my usual name Taciturn)

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  32. Your basement flood makes me think of how my dorm hall lost its carpet. I lived in the basement of a fifty year-old dormitory for a few years. The septic drain line for the building or possibly more ran through the middle of our corridor. One day I came back from class to find bricks on the floor of the hall. Why? Because the drain had overflowed into our hall and our showers to boot.

    Someone (or a group) from facilities asked if we wanted to get rid of of the carpet running down the middle of the hall. (Maybe thee was a meeting; it’s been a few decades.) YES!

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  33. Well, at least it hasn’t reached the “Flaming Dumpster In Flood Waters” stage, so there’s that.

    Hope things get better.

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    1. My life at times went to “flaming garbage truck”, and perhaps “large tire mountain dump fire” once.

      …

      “… I got better….”

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      1. …..and just like that, the dumpster ignites….

        My oh-so-reliable 17 yesr old vehicle just ate a wheel bearing. And …. and….

        Sigh. (Grin)

        That was on the way back from a match. It is amazing how poorly one scores when one gets the giggles during the first run. Was certainly entertaining. Other five runs were rather good. But #1 was definitely “Blazing Saddles”.

        on way home “What the heck is that droning noise? …. oh crap…. “

        I am reminded of “Life of Brian” and the scene with the song “Always look on the bright side of life”.

        (grin)

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  34. Pretty sure I know the answer (health reasons), but it occurs to me to ask our hostess if it would equally effective to have key family members brought to the States for a a nice church wedding here instead of there.

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      1. I can say with confidence that the insurance company will look into subrogating a payment from the city if they think it’s worth the reward.

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