Anyhow, here’re my proportions, based as always on prior recipes and on Cooking for Engineers. This time I also have Aquavit, so I put some of that in there too.

Filet weight: 4.5 lbs

Kosher Salt: 10 T
Granulated Sugar: 8 T
Ground Black Pepper: 18 g (~10 tsp)
Bunches Dill: 2
Peel from Meyer Lemons: 5 lemons (peeled with sharp vegetable peeler – juiced the lemons afterwards for cocktails)
Aquavit: 1/4 cup

I mixed it less sweet than the conventional 1:1 salt/sugar ratio because my notes from 2009 said that that ratio was a bit sweet. So we’ll see about this one. Also unknown is how the Aquavit will affect it. I plan to cure for 72 hours, flipping every 12 or so hours.

Fish-Dill-Peel sandwich is wrapped up and curing in the fridge. Will report back later.

Been working on the various upkeep aspects of the house and making various kinds of progress:

• Electrician has quoted for the majority of the work needed in the house. Unfortunately, electricity in the house is bad. It’s not critical or anything (except for one switch in the basement that sparks when you flip it), but most of the lines are not properly grounded, most walls do not have 2 outlets (per code), most rooms and appliance circuits do not have their own dedicated circuits, etc. Total work quoted so far is about $6400. And I don’t have to do all of it, certainly not all at once, certainly not right away, but I expect I’ll get to it. Have an appointment on Sept 11, I think, to fix that switch and to figure out why there’s no power to the mantle outlets (I think they’re on one of the Kitchen appliance circuits that has been off for quite some time).
• Painters came through and did work on the cottage for Mom. Very good and professional – a little bit of comms problems between the salesguy, the manager and the actual on-site team that I’ll leave them feedback about on Angie’s List, but overall a good job at a very reasonable price. CertaPro painters of Berkeley.
• Comcast is coming today to upgrade me from slow AT&T DSL to blazing Comcast Blast speed (30 Mbps down/4 – 5 Mbps up). I already have the cable modem (ubee, highest rated on Amazon). I was thrilled to hear when I ordered the Comcast that I could buy and supply my own modem instead of having to lease from Comcast. I also ordered a high-speed next gen wireless router (Netgear) which should come today. Our hope is that it will have a better transmitting range than the AT&T-supplied modem/router combo and also that we can put it in a more advantageous place to share its signal with Mom’s cottage. I’ll report back.
• I’ve got a lot, but not all, of my infrastructure in place. Still need to get a decent TV for playing games, and an XBox.
• I spent a ghastly amount of money on beds. I bought a solid, nice, functional queen sized bed frame to go with the nice Tempurpedic mattress Mom already had and was leaving in the main house with me. The frame is FABULOUS. VERY solid, very sound. I put it on rubber feet so it simply will not slide around on the floor (you have to get each leg off the feet so it has a chance of doing so), and I padded all the possible sides of the frame that might touch the wall with felt pads. So it’s configured for silent running, which is, you know, useful.
  Additionally I also ordered a King-sized bed frame and mattress from the same folks. I anticipate delivery in 8-12 weeks at which point I’ll move from the middle bedroom to the slightly larger back bedroom where I’ll have them set up the King.
• I need to arrange for a plumber to come and look at the systems. There are a lot of taps that have restricted flow for some reason or another. I’m also thinking about installing a new toilet with the water saving two-button flush approach.
• I am thinking (not seriously, yet) about getting floor cleaning robots. Here’s an Ask MetaFilter post I asked with lots of answers and opinions.f
• I need to call a maid service when I’m more settled and ask them for quotes for monthly or twice monthly service, mostly floors, maybe some dusting. Good thing I have Angie’s List all set up here.
• I need to figure out how to get all the accumulating junk out of the front of the garage/basement – either wait for Berkeley City’s pile o’ garbage pickups or see if I can hire a junk hauler.
• I need to organize the basement, get the electrician to install some more light sockets, and really go to town with storage of stuff, since it looks like Mom won’t be furnishing her cottage with most of the furniture in the main house and not all of the nice furniture she got is exactly to my tastes.

Not house-related but what I need to do:

• Get the final stuff done for taking over the last of Dad’s finances – power of attorney on long-automated direct deposit accounts and other stuff related to his retirement plans.
• Move my banking around to a local credit union and maybe move direct deposits too.
• Set up CrashPlan+ as offline data storage for my household.
• Look into Thunderbolt-enabled RAID-based storage enclosures for Time Machine for my Mac Mini server.
• Think about upgrading my Mac Mini to OS X Mountain Lion (currently Lion).
• Set up a household budget, savings, plan, etc.
• Look into whether I should move the 529 plan for Carter to one in California (probably not).
• Other geeky and financial stuff I am sure I will get around to as I can.

Soon I will even have a housewarming party, I think. We’ll see. There’s lots of work still to do, but I’m starting to feel like I’m on the downward slope into being able to relax again.

Maybe soon it will also be time to either figure out how to get to Ba Gua regularly or take up again with Aikido, which I also find myself missing. And also sign up for classes at The Crucible.

So let’s start by saying that even though this is the first time for me, I know it’s normal and natural in a breakup for folks who were mutual friends of all partners in a relationship to choose sides. This happens even if there’s no reason for it – sometimes people just gravitate to a certain person in the relationship, sometimes a friend doesn’t really like one individual and sees no reason to continue once the relationship is sundered. Certainly there are quite a few folks who have told me of no desire to continue with Hanne now that we’re split up. I think it’s a shame, and I don’t think it’s necessary. I’d rather that Hanne and I could continue to have all the same remarkable friends that we started out sharing.

I guess the stragglers who choose sides late in the game or express it to me late in the game are the hardest for me. Sometimes it seems a pretty trivial thing, like I commented on something they wrote and it reminded them that I’m no longer in the inner circle. But it’s hard not to take that pretty personally, especially since it’s so unilateral and so uncommunicative, just a switch flipping off where it was previously on.

I also think, though this is hard for me to conjecture, hard for me to bear thinking, because it’s hard to feel the additional impact, that folks are taking my internal processing and external silence as cutting them off. If that’s true, then I’m cutting off the world, and it’s not personal. It’s just how I work. It’s part of decades of Dad’s insistence that I keep a low profile, that I not cause trouble, that I take care of my emotional shit before I go asking for help, and probably a little miscalibration from my constant clashes with Hanne for the six to nine months prior our official split-up. (There was a lot of silence then. It was that or risk an emotionally violent clash where neither of us could understand where it was coming from. Very rough.)

It’s in my nature to withdraw while I try to get my house in order. I think it’s usually not noticeable. Because of my early childhood training in emotional control and conflict resolution, it usually takes me seconds or minutes to do that. But because of all that was going on, all that happened or was happening or about to happen, there was a point where I just couldn’t get right up again. And I was down for a very long time. Down and silent and hurt, raging, in despair, lonely and helpless.

I took the subject for this post, paraphrased because the piece is in Baltimore, from a piece of art that Hanne commissioned for me from Liz for my birthday in 2011. It’s art and calligraphy with lots of charming, loving phrases about how we love each other. I think that still holds. At least it did last time I checked with Hanne. That we can no longer live together, that our friendship took some serious, mighty bruisings and that we need some time apart, and out of communication to maybe heal that is incontrovertible, but the love and regard for each other is still there, battered though it is.

And speaking of bruisings, why silence, Malcolm? Because I’m still reeling and recalibrating. Aside from my long, intense and traumatic breakup with Hanne (and the grieving and loss associated), I have also had other things going on in my life. Dad, demented, brain injury, had cranial surgery in February of 2010, spent 6 months or so with Hanne and me (doing serious harm to and straining our already rock relationship to a breaking point) and is now, long term, possibly until he dies, in a long term care house, a nursing home. I visit him weekly and I’m lucky when he remembers who I am, when he remembers something I told him 5 minutes ago. Somewhere in that hot mess I was grieving Dad too.

This flared up in winter/spring of 2010/2011. In part because of that and in part because of the breakup and in part because I need healing, a rest, I’m selling my house in Baltimore and moving back to my childhood (High School) home in Berkeley, CA. I’m helping run my Dad’s estate, helping bring the house back into full repair, helping Mom manage Dad’s situation. I’m negotiating the repercussions, still, of the breakup. I’m negotiating a new relationship that I found along the way (from OK Cupid, oddly – and we’re still randomly discovering these sort of improbable things we have in common). These are serious, huge, life changes singly. All together? I’ll let you imagine that.

So yeah, life’s rough, with diamond patches of pure bliss, and in that way it is similar to every other day in my life but more intense, more immediate, more draining, more loving? More of everything and sometimes it feels like I’m simply not going to make it through the day. And sometimes I have very escapist fantasies. And as long as they remain fantasies, I should be okay. And they do and they are.

But I have been keeping to myself and I think that’s been to my detriment because in the face of my stony silence, some friends who might have been on the fence about me versus Hanne (though again, I exhort everyone still on the fence NOT to take sides – there’s no practical reason that I know of to do that) maybe chose Hanne because at least she was talking.

It is not in my nature to dwell on the bad, or at least it isn’t any more. That’s a change in me that’s recent and I think very much for the good. But let me lift the covers and give you a taste.

Before I turned all of it around (by finally going to therapy that Hanne had been begging me to go to for years, on and off, by taking on the lessons of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, by getting through this neutron star of depression, anxiety, fear, introversion and seeing light on the other side… freedom) I was crushed by all this life going on around me. I was grieving the lost (one-sided, Dad living in dementia-land) relationship with my Dad, grieving the changes in my relationship with Hanne that ultimately wrought our split-up, grieving loss and change in general. It was rough. I was suicidal (privately), escapist, desperate for sleep, for rest, for any sign of hope and any cure. I think that Hanne matched me there or was worse (and she certainly has had her own life-changing issues to deal with), but I was sincerely not equipped to handle all of that AND help Hanne AND help my father AND help my mother AND cultivate my career AND find my own peace in anything but desolation.

In our split up and talks, discussions, fights and screaming fights (and a notable one (TRIGGER WARNING: I talk about violent rage in the link) where I punched the fridge and immediately regretted it) during which we separately and mutually engaged in a lot of nasty, dirty, unseemly fighting tactics including siliencing, gaslighting, shouting, screaming, witch hunting, guilting, icing each other out and desperate, clinging codependence and loss, it became pretty clear to me that there was a lot of mutual lostness, helplessness and despairing loss.

And I couldn’t do much about Hanne’s. It was ultimately why I agreed to split, agreed to share assets, agreed with all I could – feeling guilty, feeling desolate, feeling lonely will get me to agree to a lot of generousness in hopes of healing the world.

I guess, though, I probably overextended the generosity because now I feel poor. Not in material goods. What deficit I have there will be healed with time. But I feel poor in friends I used to have. I have driven away some or neglected some into despairing of me, and for that I’m deeply and truly sorry. I wish I could wave a magic wand and fix it but I know that the truth is far more work.

Which I am absolutely willing to do. But I won’t chase you. If you’re gone, you’re gone, and I will get over it. But if you are on the fence and you want to talk and you want to see it further friendship can be made to work, please give me a chance and talk with me. Far too many are already gone with nary a word. And though it should be least of all given my other worries, it really is significan to me that the most frequent mode of departure is just cutting me off. I’d love to have at least a civil conversation about it before my former friends leave. So I can at least know what the perception is of any wrong I may or may not have done. So I might argue for some forgiveness and, if nothing else, closure.

There are too many factors and too many privacies to discuss here, but let’s say that most people would say that I’ve clearly expressed my generosity in the financial and material arrangements I made with Hanne during the split. This is founded both on compassion (because I do care about Hanne) and feminist politics/ethics (because my earning potential has been so much higher than Hanne’s for all of our relationship, because I can fix most missing things and problems with money, and she can’t, or not as easily as I can). Note that I am not saying I’m rich – I’m not – but my career in IT will allow me to make enough to care for my elders and should also see me well through my own retirement, and possibly even some loved ones too as we all get older.

I’d planned, before Hanne decided not, to spend the rest of my life with Hanne. So we’d accumulated the good, adult type solid wood heirloom furniture that we found at pretty good prices from a local furniture merchant. It’s made of renewable mahogany from Indonesia and shipped here after assembly there. And I had to sell or give most of it away as part of dealing with house sale prep. And I offered, as part of the split, almost all of the material goods in the house to Hanne if she wanted it. So she’s taken freely and I’m mostly okay with it.

So now that her PODS container is almost entirely packed, the house is almost entirely empty. I keep thinking “interstitial”, but it’s really like all the edges have bits and pieces of things in them. I have maybe 10 – 15 12x12x12 boxes of stuff with some additional things that are of odd sizes, to move. The bed is still here but it’s not going (I’ll dispose of it when I move for sure). Same with the 40″ TV (found a home for it) and a couple of pieces of heirloom furniture waiting to go to their new homes or into long term storage.

Most of my new life is in California. I remain here in Baltimore to see to moving my stuff and seeing to selling the house and then I’ll be gone. I don’t know if I’ll come back except for business (i’m working remotely for my current company once in California) and very occasional visits. But even then, I have a few of my own friends, certainly, but the folks I mostly made contacts with were through Hanne and I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in their lives without her. I guess we’ll see.

So for me it’s selling, then packing, then moving. Then cultivating myself in the Bay Area, cultivating new friendships, taking care of Mom and Dad and the property.

I think the worst part is being terrified of being lonely. Which is odd, since when I am actually alone, I’m not lonely. So maybe those are different things.