gs_silva

Jon and his girlfriend Heather on the phone together

"Hi, Heather," Jon says. "I haven't seen you in a while."

"Sorry, Jon!" says Heather. "I've been volunteering at my church - it keeps me busy."

"Can you make time to hang out?"

"Hey, you could come to church with me!" suggests Heather.

"Does it have a lot of stairs?" Jon worries.

Heather admits it does. "But we could have some of the guys carry you up."

"Not happening," Jon grumbles. "Can't we do something else? Daisy's on Saturday? You haven't come in a month." Daisy's is one of the pubs where Maurice's classic rock cover band plays.

"Yeah, I..." Heather hesitates. "I'm tired of it."

"Heather," asks Jon, "are you avoiding me?"

"No!" she quickly replies. "I'll figure something out. I'm just busy. It's not you."

***

In Jon's original character concept, he used to have a lot of girlfriends very briefly before the accident. He wasn't really a player; he just wasn't very clingy, and when a relationship ended, he was self-confident enough to move on.

Then when he became disabled, he didn't have any relationships at all for several years, partly because he needed the time to pull himself together and had lost much of his confidence. He doesn't go out much anymore, and he's not sure what he's capable of, sexually.

And then in Book 2: In Which They're Adults and Some of Them Have Kids (working title), Jon finally gets a meaningful relationship.

But for some reason, he's interrupted his long dry period to go back to having rapidfire girlfriends. Well, not that rapidfire, I suppose. He fooled around with Christine and Trish earlier. Heather is his ex-girlfriend, who was planning to be angry at him forever, and then had a change of heart when she saw him in a wheelchair. Heather is... kind of shallow, honestly. She seems emotionally distant. I can't get into her head.

I think she's just figuring herself out, and she'll build on her college experiences and the friends she made along the way, but she doesn't want to stick around.

***

I've been busy myself. This broken fridge fiasco ended up being quite the ordeal, and made SUCH a mess, and I'm still cleaning it up. I haven't done any meaningful yardwork in 2 days, which is a shame because the weather was perfect for it. Thank goodness my mother still knows how to hang out and bring in laundry - I can use the clothesline thanks to her. If it were all up to me, I don't think I could physically do the work on top of all the other labor I'm doing.

The good news is that the service repairman came by, didn't speak much English, but I'm used to that, and we got through it, and he happened to have a compressor in the truck so he replaced mine on the spot. The head office messaged me while he was here and advised me to cancel the appointment so that I could go through the 7 troubleshooting steps. But I'd already done that on Monday, and there was only one step I hadn't completed while on tech support chat, and it turned out to not be the problem. The compressor was the problem. It all works now. So I messaged the head office back saying that we had it handled already. They never replied.

I made a weird pizza to use up some of the food in danger of being spoiled: cheddar, pepper, and spinach with some sausage. It's fine; probably better than one who has never had a cheddar pizza would expect. But, surprise! I used to make pizza with nonstandard cheeses in China all the time, because cheese was hard to get, so I'd get whatever kind I could.