Good morning folks. I am slowly getting back to my normal self. It is going to be a long road… covered with many potholes… but bit by bit I am returning to some resemblance of the person I was. I got a second good night of sleep, and probably would have gotten more hours were it not for the fact that my mom called as I was heading to bed… and then talked for an hour and a half. I love her… but she has never known social queues and also has zero chill when it comes to not telling me everything that she is thinking at that exact moment. She like everyone simply cares about my well being and is worried about me. Legitimately… I never knew this many people actually cared. I’ve mostly thought of myself as background noise most of the time, but apparently I am noticed and appreciated.
My friend Krikket has gotten the ball rolling on the Blaugust 2025 festivities with the traditional Blaugust is Coming post detailing all of the information. My mind went in a bajillion directions when my wife passed away, but one of them was to go into the mentor area of the Blaugust discord and admit to them that I could not do this. Krikket was the first person to offer to take up the mantle, but almost immediately everyone chimed in and just ran with it. This is the most beautiful thing for me because I wanted to build some semblance of a community that could exist without me… and apparently I did just that. I think it was Wilhelm/TAGN that created the logo… which admittedly captures the essence of pretty much every logo I have ever created. They busily planned in the mentor channel and I sort of let it all wash over me, not really paying much attention until yesterday when the announcement post went live.
I cannot fully express in words how thankful I am that this is going to happen, and that I am not having to touch anything. I am still trying to keep the media kit page updated, since that page gets a lot of hits during the event. You can find relevant things like the sign-up form and links to the various social accounts and discord. I am not 100% sure how much I am going to participate in Blaugust proper but I am signing up. It is going to be interesting taking a backseat to this event, but quite honestly… I am very happy I am not having to drive. That was honestly a thing that I learned with the guild that I lead in World of Warcraft… I mad everything too personal to my vision. In truth with Blaugust I wanted to create something that was malleable and could be formed into whatever vision it needed to take that year. As such I tried my best to keep a light touch on the steering wheel so that if I ever needed to jump from the moving vehicle I could, and let someone else take over. Apparently that more or less has worked.
Rebuilding Normal
I’ve had this string of big deep emotional posts lately, but I am not sure what new revelations I have for you this morning. I’ve come to realize that I was not the one mangling our sheets… because making the bed each morning is as simple of an act as pulling up the corner I turned down. I’ve also decided that laundry is super simple since I almost entirely wear dark colors, and can simply chuck things directly into the washing machine until I have enough to run a load and then run it regardless of what day of the week it is. I ordered a whole mess of Chinese food last night so that I can eat on it for most of the weekend. Other than that I am just trying to carve out something resembling a new normal. I need to talk to my boss this morning and find out how Human Resources wants me to codify all of the time I have been taking. I made some early inroads for dealing with some of the financial and insurance things, but quickly came to the point where I am going to have to have final death certificates before I can actually wrap any of that up.
I desperately need to go out into the garage and clean, so that I am going to have room to stack the things that will be coming from her classroom. Essentially on the day of the visitation, her teacher friends offered to pack up her room for me and separate what were educational resources and what were personal effects into different sets of boxes. The thing is… my wife would have wanted to pack everything up herself, but I am just going to allow them to help me with this thing. My vehicle can hold a lot of stuff and it will be easy enough to drag things home. I just need to clear out some of the boxes that I have not broken down yet, and take a load of cardboard to the recycler in order to make room to stack this new stuff. The ideal time to give away teachers resources is right now, just ahead of a new school year… but I am not sure I am going to have it in me to deal with any of it this year.
She also took up 80% of our closet and I intend to go through all of that at some point and find some organization to donate it to. There is always a high demand for professional clothing that fits larger women’s sizes, especially among the whole “pathway to work” type organizations. So I know at some point I would want to donate that, because there is no use in any of the clothing effective just rotting in my closet. We already regularly donated quite a bit of stuff so I have zero qualms about this being the avenue she would have wanted. Her dad was saying something about selling things… but he has always focused on the money and for me… it is more about helping others than trying to profit from this situation. Sure we spent plenty of money over the years on nice things… but I largely view that as the cost of existing as a human and not something I am going to ever attempt to recoup.
There are things that I want to do… but I have to reach the point where I don’t feel guilty for doing them. Like we had talked about getting rid of the nasty loveseat in the loft, so I am absolutely going to do that. I am however probably going to replace it with another comfy couch option and set up my consoles out there. Originally we had planned on turning it into a reading nook for her to curl up, and that would have been lovely… but that is also not necessarily me. I prefer reading from bed when I am reading books, and then more often tend to consume books in audio book form while I am playing games. So I am will be taking the initial inspiration and then just shifting it to make sense for me. I still want to maintain the living room as a more generic space and don’t want all of my consoles hooked up out there. I have my Switch 2 hooked up but that is about it, and that is also a pretty lightweight affair.
Whenever I deal with giving away the educational resources in her office… I am probably going to start shifting that space into more of a hobby room. I used to love painting miniatures, and I just never really maintained that hobby throughout the years. I liked painting way more than I actually liked playing the war games associated with it. I’ve always wanted to get into 3D Printing, so I am thinking her office might be the ideal place to set that up. Again… I am going to have to reach an emotional point where I can deal with even going into her office… let alone packing it up and giving it again… but someday. I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts. I don’t want to erase my wife from this house, but it also seems silly to have entire rooms of the house that are no longer functional because they were devoted to a thing that will never happen again. She was way less emotional about everything than I am… so I would like to think she would want me to re-engineer the spaces to fit my needs. Its just really fucking hard.
She was always the person who kicked me into action on all of the little ideas that we had. I was the one who was mostly happy with the status quo, because the status quo was simple. I am going to have to channel my wife if I ever want to get anything done. I miss her so god damned much. I am so angry that this happened and I am not sure that will ever change. She was my person, and I never imagined a world without her. Now that I have to deal with that reality… I am trying my best to cope with it. One life ended on July 2nd at 8 pm… and out of the ashes of it I have to figure out how to build a new life.
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