1163 More Like It.

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Today I cracked open one of the Teen’s PS4 controllers. The buttons had been sticking and I figured it just needed to be cleaned out. Canned air wasn’t getting it done, so I went ahead and took it apart. Or, more accurately, opened it up and accidentally spilled the innards all over the floor. Luckily most companies make their remotes idiot proof these days. Things only fit back together one way. As long as you can solve a puzzle you can put a controller back together. Parts of the inside were actually broken, (The Teen sometimes ragequits.) but they weren’t so broken that I couldn’t fuse them back together. In the end I got the thing back in working order. What with a controller costing as much as a game in some cases I think it’s foolish not to at least try to do some maintenance on them. I think people would be surprised how simple those things are if they took a chance to look inside.

This Thanksgiving will be the first without the Teen’s dad. I don’t suppose I really need to explain what that means. He’s been gone just shy of a year. A year that has been so traumatic that its perceived brevity should really be counted as a blessing. Somehow it doesn’t feel that way. It just seems further away from familiar times. It makes me feel lonely. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but the inevitability of change is one of the only things that makes me notice it.

In any event, I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving if you observe it. If not, I hope your Thursday treats you well. I’ll be here, waiting for you, on Friday. Like always.

35 Comments

When my maternal grandmother died, it was the Monday after that year’s Thanksgiving…I think it’s been…14 years now…wow….Um..lost my train of thought now, just realized it’s really been that long. The holidays are rough enough when you haven’t lost anyone smack on top of them. My only useful advice is to take it easy, and, though I doubt you’re someone who’d push the issue, don’t make her talk about it. If you feel you need to, simply say you’re there if she needs you.

Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes to all of you.

I tried opening up one of my pc gamepads when some goo from a certain someone’s (you know who you are!) fingers got into it… It got kind of complicated, it was so hard just getting the thing to open cleanly, and the shoulder buttons were being annoying, I was afraid I’d just break the thing so I abandoned the idea of disassembling it all the way – instead, I just filed the button holes a bit looser so they wouldn’t get stuck…

It’s been an extremely rough year or 2 for me physically (emergency surgeries, a few mini-strokes, surprise internal bleeding)- all this after 30 years of no health problems. Add depression and PTSD to it, and it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster!

I’m not saying all that for a pity party. I’m saying it because no matter what I’ve been through these past few years, BF has been always been here. There’s always a happy moment, a joke or just feel good. It’s made the long nights when I just can’t take anymore so much better when I can open up an update at 11:05 pm and see the gang

Thanks for what you do Crave. You make so many of us feel good, even if for a few short moments a few times a week. I’m thankful to have found your page, grown to love you and the worlds you have created and all around jovial good nature.

Keep it up and hug the teen for all of us. It’ll be a rough year, but at least she has someone as awesome as you around. <3

Last year was the year from Hell for me. I lost my Mom Leap Year Day, my favorite dog died soon after my birthday, and my brother’s dog (a good buddy who lived with my dogs and me) died a couple weeks later. I got a puppy this spring, but my other dog died a month later. Over the course of about 14 months, my life pretty much sucked. I’d start to recover from something, and Life would beat me up with something new.

Since perhaps May of this year, things have improved, aside from a chronic arthritis problem with my knee, but OTC meds make it bearable (the only thing worse than getting old, Dad used to say, is the alternative); so I guess it’s looking up.

I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner with my brothers and sister and her family; we’re going to the same restaurant we went to last year, so no one has to cook. Christmas is a non-starter for me, aside from getting a few gift cards for my 15-year-old niece, we don’t exchange gifts. It’s just Family Time.

Anyway, sorry to be a downer, but I hope all your lives get better and better for Thanksgiving, [insert Winter Solstice Holiday of your choice here] and the New Year.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Between Failures fans!

Right? Totally feel yeah.

My entire life has just- shut down. But it’s slowly getting better. It’s not anything what it was, but it’s better.

Cheers to you and yours, and I hope you can find strength this holiday.

My brothers and I lost our father just shy of Halloween, about 20 years ago now. Can’t say the sting ever really goes away, but like Silk Spectre says in the Watchmen? The past just keeps getting brighter.

The pain doesn’t really ever go away. It just becomes more manageable as time goes on. The teen is very lucky to have should an awesome person like you around.

Be sure to give her a hug and tell her that ‘yes, it hurts so much now, but it the pain will lessen’.

First of all, let me say that this story has been truly awesome. I started from thecbeginning, and now that I’m all caught up, I really wish I could work with a crew like this. Truly awesome people…er…characters.

I also wanted to say that I lost my Dad 3 days after my wedding, which put his death 2 days before Christmas. Ever since then (11 yeats this year), the holidays have been especially hard for me. So yes, I honestly know how she feels. The only advice I can give is to let her know that it will get easier eventually, but as long as you remember what that person means to you, they are never truly gone.

Happy-er Holidays and Best Wishes to you all.

Sorry to nitpick, but in the first word balloon it’s “relieve” not “releive”. That aside, I hope you and the Teen enjoy the season. The holidays are stressful enough without dealing with grief. Both my parents are dead, but I guess I’m so old that it seems expected. Nonetheless, it really feels like I just haven’t visited them in a long while, and they’re still there. I do make it a habit not to drive past the old place though. Guess I really don’t want to see anyone else in my original home.

Maybe I’m just cold and heartless, but it seems that death in our family tends to be… a relief? I haven’t lost my parents, but my grandparents had it pretty rough in their final years. When they finally passed away, it was peace for them, and less stress for all of us.

I think my mom took it harder than anyone else. Even so, there was an event with my grandfather when he was up in the attic one day during summer, and passed out. The neighbor came and saved his life. My mom always felt my grandfather would have been better off if he had died that day.

He had Alzheimer’s. We wanted so badly for him to go in the comfort of his own home (which he built by himself). The state came in and basically forced our family to put him (and my grandmother) in a nursing home.

Of course, they died after full, long lives. Their end wasn’t something to be envied. I don’t know. Other than my grandparents on both sides of our families, death has mostly left our family alone.

I really don’t think anyone in my family fears death. Perhaps the manner it might come, but not the act, itself.

Also, Brooksie. I can’t sit on my heels like that when I squat. I’ve never really been able to, even when I was skinny. Also, we finally get to see a character’s entire body in the panel! (Except for those elusive feet!) It doesn’t happen very often.

I understand death being a relief in some cases. My paternal grandparents both died within the past couple of years, but being older than when my other grandmother passed, and seeing the reality of the end of their lives instead of being kept at a distance, made their deaths seem easier to take to me. My grandfather had been in declining health and could barely move anymore, though he died as a result of them trying to improve his quality of life when he was too weak to survive rehabilitation.

My grandmother died less than a year later. After having been in an accident, we had to put her into a nursing home because we couldn’t afford an at home nurse to care for her. Her health began to decline, and after a hospital visit, we found out why. Cancerous lesions in her lungs, that she was unaware of, spread to her brain. Gradually, she descended into dementia, but not the sometimes forgetful type. We moved her to hospice so they could make her comfortable, but there was little they could do to really set her at ease. She was terrified and didn’t understand where she was or why she was being kept there. She would scream, not loudly since she was physically unable, but the sound was heartbreaking. You could feel the pain and terror she was in. In the end, she only really recognized her sons, so my dad and uncle did the best they could to visit often so she wouldn’t be so afraid. She passed within a month of finding the lesions, and at the time, the only thing I could think was that at least she wasn’t scared or hurting anymore.

I need to stop posting here, I keep rambling too much.

Brooksie is looking especially adorable today!

I agree on the controller maintenance. It’s silly how some people throw out perfectly good controllers for “being broken”, when they usually just need a good cleaning or a little recalibrating.

And oh, yeah — the stars in Brooksie’s eyes outshine everyone’s shared blushes…

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go check my blood sugar…

Gods balls, I sometimes forget how cute Jo is. Heh, she reminds me of my little sister. Which is a disturbing thought now, because I have entertained sexual thoughts of Jo. Dammit.

Wow, I remember a while back, in the haunted school bit, Thomas said he had a hard time seeing Jo as a sexual being. That has quite changed, huh?

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