Fun and Frolic With Long-Term Love

Can I just be one of the other people who would like to thank you for the financial/legal posts? I'm in discussion to buy an apartment with a potential partner and it was interesting looking at all the things I need to be bringing up.
 
Yay! I am so glad people are finding my posts helpful. :)

I am up early today, in spite of not going to bed until 1 am. I had trivia last night, and it was our Halloween costume get-together. My team went as elements from the periodic table, which was my suggestion, since I taught Chemistry last year and we are all huge nerds. Anyway, it was bunches of fun being helium. I dressed in all blue and white and had 5 helium balloons tied up over my head. Other members of my team were Americium (dressed as Captain America), Berkelium (dressed as a hippie), Silver (all silver-colored clothes & hair), Aluminum (foil hat & accessories), Neon (bright obnoxious clothing) and Sodium (salt packets attached all over their outfit).

After I got home, PunkRock and I spent a few hours online and watched all 4 episodes of Charlie the Unicorn because he had never seen it. Now we can't stop making the stupid little tongue noise from episode 2 at each other. My daughter's cat Stuart keeps giving us a stare down when we do it. He is not amused. PunkRock just left for work, and that is prolly a good thing. lol

Today on my to-do list involves printing out advance directive forms for Darknight, PunkRock and myself. Apparently each state has different laws regarding on how these things should work. I live in Maryland, so I am talking about Maryland stuff here. I think most states are similar, but this is what my state does! Here, there is one form that they provide that combines medical power of attorney and the living will. We don't need a lawyer to make it legal, so that is a plus.

So, basically a medical power of attorney is a document that names someone to be your health care proxy if you are unable to make decisions on your own in the hospital, nursing home or where ever. This person is your agent and can decide whether to pull the plug or give you a feeding tube, among other things. You can name alternates if the first person isn't available. They will be able to visit you in the hospital, and travel in an ambulance with you, if they'd like.

I am thinking that DarkKnight and I will both name PunkRock as our health care proxy because more than likely, each of us will already be able to have access to the other in a hospital, since we are legally married. PunkRock is the one who could potentially be barred from visitations, etc. and naming him our decision maker will give him access to us that he wouldn't otherwise be able to get, if we were in ICU or someplace fairly restricted. DarkKnight will be the alternate on mine, and then my oldest daughter - just in case all 3 of us get into comas in a car crash or something.

So that's medical power of attorney. The second part of the document is called the living will. This is where you agree to whatever procedures you want your agent to carry out. I want to be given blood transfusions; I want to be on a breathing machine for X number of days - that sort of thing. The agent can override this part of the document, but it gives them a written framework of what you wanted initially. Because, you know, things happen and maybe you would have wanted a feeding tube but then you were declared legally brain dead, and your agent would know that you didn't want that tube forever, keeping your husk alive indefinitely.

I'm not filling the forms out today, but I am printing them for discussion at a later date. Maybe we can find time this weekend to sit down and work it out. It's definitely important. It's one way that I can guarantee that PunkRock gets rights that the state would ordinarily just reserve for DarkKnight, as my legal husband. I like to think it's a big "fuck you" and a viable work around for our poly selves.

Oh, and if you decide to change your mind at a later date - at any time, like because of a breakup or whatever - you can make the original document void my making a new one and dating it with the new date. It's that easy.
 
Dear Bluebird, first and foremost, I thank you :) for sharing your life stories with us. I am new to this site and really intrigued by your confidence and self esteem on how you go about doing what you feel is right without giving a crap what other people think (as a woman, sometimes I wish I could do the same...) I'd like to ask you: how many nights do you spend with your husband and your boyfriend per week? in other words, how often do you see them and does seeing one sometimes interfere with your work, in terms of commuting?
 
If you read through my blog, you'll see that my boyfriend moved in during the beginning of the summer. So I spend some time everyday with both my guys. :) I alternate sleepovers - last night PunkRockAwesomesauce snuggled me to sleep, and tonight my husband will be in my bed. If it's a sleepover night, the other guy gets a date night. Sometimes it's a movie, or a coffee shop visit, sometimes it may be just cuddling in front of the fireplace or TV. Or, we may have a super awesome event to attend, or we go grocery shopping. I try to even it out so each guy gets fun time as well as errands. :) As I said, tonight is DarkKnight's sleepover night, so PunkRock and I spent the evening at Dunkin Donuts, eating deliciousness and discussing our living wills. Then we came home, and he is currently on the couch, surfing Facebook while I am typing away to you. :) Prior to that I was working on my cross-stitch.

I don't work outside the home, as I am a stay at home mom who is homeschooling my 16 year old daughter. I teach once a week at a homeschool co-op and once a week I run a science course from my house. Last year it was a lab-based chemistry class for high schoolers, this semester it is introductory astronomy. Loving my guys doesn't interfere with this.

Ask away - I don't mind. :)
 
Mattress shopping is such a drag, but it was fun with PunkRock. I hope to check out at least two more stores today . . .
Oh, man, you gotta check out the mattresses at IKEA. I was skeptical, but they are awesome! The top of the line from IKEA would be under $1000, including a foundation (boxspring), and you can get great mattresses alone there for about $600 - 700. They come with a 25-year warranty. My mattress has received compliments on its comfort from several lovers of mine, and it hasn't sagged or given me any problems since my husband and I bought it about ten years ago. They don't have those sleazy mattress salespeople you have to deal with everywhere else (they're mostly all selling Sealy's or Serta's with their own labels on them, anyway - have you ever read any of the exposés on the mattress industry? Eye-opening!) and IKEA delivers, too. I highly recommend. Seriously, it is the best bed I ever owned.

I also have known lots of people who were happy with mattresses they got at Macy's, and sometimes they have great sales.
 
Last edited:
Cindie, we did find a bed for less than $2000 that we all liked, though I won't be paying for it until next week. I am astounded how easily we all fell into a consensus and picked a mattress together! It was actually easier than when we bought a new couch earlier this year! I didn't think of IKEA. :)

Poly69 - DarkKnight has a "no dingus" rule, so no group sex here! PunkRock doesn't like group snuggles much either, even on the couch, so I don't anticipate any MFM ever happening. They are both straight. I am too, and since they are both currently mono, there's no MFF either. At some point, PunkRock says he may want to date, but so far we like our V.

That said, we spend lots of time together as a 3 - we have dinner as a family almost every night that all of us are home, we do lunch dates all together once in a while, and we go to the movies, events and shopping together too, if we are all free.
 
Ugh. PunkRockAwesomesauce has a sore throat, and I am feeling VERY under the weather today. I slept all morning and my eyes are weepy and watery. I've sneezed 3 times in the last 30 minutes.

I just canceled our plans for tonight - two of our friends were coming over to play Zombicide. We are still handing out candy tonight though - I bought a pack of 52 full size candy bars from Sam's Club. The hell if I am having an assorted mix of that in the house all weekend. I'd eat them all, I'm sure.

Here's a pic I took last night while curled up on the loveseat:

picture.php


PunkRock's cat, Stormy, still is very shy about coming downstairs and interacting with everyone. When PunkRock turned on the vacuum cleaner, Stormy booked downstairs and stayed there for several hours, though. She got over being scared, took a nap on the couch and played with a milk cap ring for quite a bit. She isn't normally playful either, so that was super great. My daughter's cat, Stuart, was closed up at the time - they have epic fights, so we still keep them separated most days.
 
Hope you get feeling better soon.

Kitty!
 
I woke up early to pee this morning, so I was able to kiss my sweetie goodbye before he went into work. PunkRock won't be home until after 2 pm today, so I was glad my bladder was being a jerk. :) Even though last night was supposed to be PunkRock's sleepover night, he was still pretty ill and that combined with the fact that he had to work so early today, I switched things up and snuggled with DarkKnight instead.

Plus, today is our 9 month mark - for me and PunkRock - so I really wanted time with him tonight. Yay! 9 months! We don't have any plans, since both of us are feeling blah, but we have discussed going to see a local theater production - a dinner theater - if we feel better. So we will see. I am not so bad as to even need meds - I'm just a bit sniffly and terribly tired - but PunkRock definitely has a cold. So we will see. We aren't huge about celebrating monthiversaries anyway, so no biggie. I did just buy wood for the fireplace in the game room, so I will be just as happy if we snuggle in front of that and feed each other from a cheese tray. :)

My daughter is attending a zombie-themed murder mystery party tonight, so DarkKnight will be transporting her to that tonight. The other thing on the agenda is finding out more about a ginormous Maine Coon cat tht we might adopt. A friend messaged me last night about one needing a home by Sunday and after some discussion, we are considering it. I haven't seen a pic yet, but we know he is fixed, gets along well with other cats, is 8 years old and is black and white.
 
He sounds like a good boy.
 
Thanks for the link! I did lots of reading and decided that yes, we wanted this not-so-little guy. His previous owner brought him over and we all fell in love almost immediately.

This cat is incredible. I tried to keep him in my bedroom - the plan was to give him a week to get acclimated before introducing him to Stuart and Stormy, our other cats. However, he flopped right down like he owned the place, acted completely nonplussed to be in a completely new environment, and spent a lot of time playing "pawsies" under the door with Stuart.

So, we let him out. He totally ignored Stuart, spent time exploring the entire house, and then splayed out on the game room floor, like he had no cares in the world! He's been eating, drinking and using the litter box like a champ and he and Stuart are like peas and carrots now. I kept him isolated in my bedroom overnight though, just to mitigate any possible insanity, but he was just fine. He slept until 4 am, at which point he GALUMPED to the floor and proceeded to eat breakfast, then clamored back up beside my head to purr and chew my hair.

We've named him Static. The thing is, he is definitely not a Maine Coon because he has regular short hair. Every other characteristic he has though - he weighs 23 pounds, has the largest neck I've ever seen on an animal, is sweet as pie and - the sounds he makes! - his constant little trills don't seem to match up with his body size. They're the cutest little "notice me!" noises I have ever heard from a cat!

picture.php


He absolutely won't let you stop petting him, if he's decided that's what he wants. And he wants.

When DarkKnight picked him up to weigh him on our bathroom scale this morning, he was rather pissed off and struggled to get away. When DarkKnight put him down, Static trotted away and we saw him immediately take his annoyance out on Stuart, who was like, WTF mate? It was a quick scuffle and then they were back to being buds again. We would have thought it was a normal "getting to know you" spat, if we hadn't seen the entire encounter. Static was definitely being a bully.

Overall, he's wonderful and I am so glad he's part of our family!
 
Congratulations on the new addition! Enjoy!
 
Yes, congrats (and thanks for giving a good pet a loving home).
 
Well, Static's name wasn't working as well as we'd like, so we've renamed him Angus, and call him Gus for short.

Yesterday was awful for me! I went to bed last night and turned down sex, just so I could get the day over with and done. Let's see...

I was woken up at 6:50 am by a call from a delivery company. They were supposed to give me a 3-hour window of when they would be arriving, but instead they told me they would be arriving in 5 minutes. Since they were delivering my brand new mattress and boxspring, this meant I had to leap out of my current bed, run down the hall and wake up PunkRock, to have him come help me disassemble and move where I had just been sleeping. Then I had to throw on clothing and try to make myself presentable. I ran out of time and didn't get to vacuum under where the bed had been, but thank goodness I'm not a total slob, and there wasn't anything under there but dust and some feathers.

So yeah, things started on a very unsettling and flustered note.

Still - I was super excited to have my new bed! We paid around $1700 with taxes for the mattress and a mattress cover, and we got the split boxspring free, and the delivery was included.

The delivery crew was definitely not "officially" from the company we bought the bed from though - they subcontracted, apparently. This is important, because when they lifted the mattress, they smacked my ceiling fan and broke it. The one crewmember asked me if it had been previously broken. NOPE. Did we use it at all. Well, YES. That's sort of the point of having a ceiling fan in my bedroom! Then he told me that I should be careful from now on when using it, since it was now missing a blade. YOU THINK?!

So, I had to file a claim, and both the store manager and the delivery manager were very nice, but I have to fill out paperwork and I'm now waiting for it to arrive. I had to write an email to our property management company (we rent our house) and explain. They told me any work needed to be done by a licensed electrician. Whatever. I have to still fill out paperwork. We'll see how it goes. I'm glad it is fall and not the sweltering summer!

So, excitement AND stress, right from the get-go this morning.

Right now, my to-do list is very overwhelming. I have list after list of things to do stemming from our finance meeting last weekend, and then normal life is busy as well. So to manage things, I've been operating on a "what's on fire?" sort of way, and handling things that are the most pressing.

Oh, this is going to be a whiny complaint post. Stop reading now. Here is a list of crap that I dealt with yesterday, after the delivery craziness. It's written choppy, and it's just crap I need to throw out here so I can focus on what got done.

1 - Made a spreadsheet, budgeting for the rest of the year.

2 - Go with my husband to the bank, to do two things - open an individual savings account for him and one for my son. The plan is to stick $2400 into my husband's account so DarkKnight can pay off his student loan this year. That's all that is left to pay! I did math. Yep yep yep and it makes more sense to pay each month and improve his credit than to pay it all at once, so we're setting it aside so he can be in charge of maintaining that until next Fall. This took 30 minutes to establish by the guy in the bank.

I couldn't open a savings for my son - they wanted a copy of the original rep payee appointment letter. This didn't make sense to me, because there is already an existing rep payee checking account with my name on it at that bank, but whatever.

Then the guy tells DarkKnight that he needs to add me as a beneficiary to his individual accounts - that if he passed away, they'd be frozen and they'd become part of his estate. So then DarkKnight did paperwork so they'd all shift to my ownership instead. Made a note that PunkRock will need to do this with his individual accounts as well.

3 - Realized while DarkKnight was doing paperwork, that while my car insurance payment had posted, PunkRock's hadn't. I called the company and they said the dates hadn't lined up, so though he was 100% covered, we'd be double billed in December. Apparently there is mail coming explaining this. The rep also told me that PunkRock needs to cancel his old policy. D'oh!

4 - Drive through Burger King lunch with DarkKnight. He was late getting back to work.

5 - Dig through files and find original rep payee letter. Bemoan the state of the files and put organizing them on my to-do list.

6 - Call a medical billing company and explain (for the 6th time this year) that my daughter has two forms of insurance and they need to bill the 2nd before sending me invoices.

7 - Call medical billing company and ask for copies of specific invoices, since my husband's flexible spending account has been frozen - they're saying they don't have a copy of these invoices. As soon as I get them, I'll have to copy and email them to the flex account company, so we can pay other medical bills again.

8 - I shouldn't have eaten the oreo cookie shake.

9 - Call in my son's paystubs to the wage reporting hotline for people who get disability. File these away.

10 - Due by the 17th: From time to time the government checks in that my son is still disabled. This means a big stack of forms that need to be filled out. It depresses me to even look at the packet, much less start filling it out. But I do. I begin filling out specific diagnoses and medication information. None of this has changed.

11 - PunkRock arrives home from work. I stop and tell him about the car insurance and beneficiary forms. He gives me his driver's license renewal form. He calls the insurance company and leaves a voice mail.

12 - Drive to pick up my son from work. PunkRock comes with me. We go to the bank and handle setting up my son's saving account. I put $90 into it. He's saving to buy a car. The idea is that he will contribute $50 every two weeks into it, and I will forward $50 a month from his disability payment into it. There is a program that will help with his seed money somehow and get him a decent vehicle because he is disabled. I have not had time yet to sign him up, but getting this savings started is the first step. $150 a month is a good amount for him to save, though it might not be possible some months. I hope he can save at least $1500 by this time next year.

13 - There's a problem with getting the new account to sync with my webbanking. I forget the answers to my security question so they have to call and reset everything.

14 - PunkRock gets a call from his old insurance company. They are sad and disappointed he is leaving. Yeah, they will miss him paying twice as much as he should have for 20 years. Not surprised.

15 - PunkRock adds me as beneficiary to his individual checking and savings accounts. The lady helping us asks what relationship we are all to each other - I tell her we are a poly family and she immediately wishes she hadn't asked.

16 - Come home and PunkRock goes and takes a nap while I make phone calls for my son's disability packet. I need dates of the FIRST appointment to each of his doctors/therapists/providers within the last year, and other information from each one.

17 - I complete the packet and my son sticks it in the mailbox. His situation hasn't changed at all, but I am still nervous they may not renew his disability. That will suck. A lot.

18 - Dinner! DarkKnight made fajitas. Yum!

All of these items were punctuated by texts and phone calls from family and friends regarding different things. My daughter was in and out frequently, needing guidance and assistance with her schoolwork. You may have noticed that I did not shower. Ugh.

Anyway, that was pretty much my day. Oh! Also, I am teaching a class called "Pioneers!" to 6-10 year olds this month. This week I decided to focus on writing and school for pioneer children. PunkRock helped me out tons by cutting the ends of the quill feathers I purchased, and later on today I will have the kids write with them by dipping them in ink. PunkRock tried it last night and assured me it looked just fine. So, having that handled was wonderful. I had gathered a book to read to the kids, and purchased all the supplies on Tuesday, so I was able to put that aside a bit because PunkRock did the prep for me. This was at the end of the night - after all the other crazy that had gone on, DarkKnight took me out for date night and we spent time at the mall, doing some Christmas shopping. So, PunkRock cutting the feathers and making sure my plans were do-able removed some of my stress. Though, I was still worried that it may not work and I'd spend this morning frantically trying to make other plans!

I guess the things I did yesterday weren't mindblowingly difficult or anything, but they were all requiring detail and focused attention. And, none of them got done without interruption, or without having to go back and forth for more information. Just not fun. As the day progressed, my stress level climbed higher and higher. By the time I was back from date night, I just wanted to cry and go to sleep and forget it all.

I did have a very good sleep on my new bed and fun sexy times with PunkRock this morning, before he left for work. I'm going to pop in the shower now, and then take my daughter out to lunch before heading over to co-op. I'm supposed to play trivia tonight with my team, but I need to tap out, I think. I need to get my lists organized for the rest of the weekend. Just thinking about it sucks!
 
Last edited:
Here are two photos I took that made me feel happy.

picture.php


picture.php


I promise this won't turn into a cat blog. Stuart just loved that my mattress was up against the wall! And he looked so stinkin' cute and so proud of himself for being so high up. :) Oh! That reminded me - I also listed my old set on craigslist so I was fielding messages all day about them. I sold them at 1 pm for a hundred bucks. I should have asked for more, in hindsight. Oh well. The guy couldn't take them home, but he's picking them up on Friday. So they're still stuck up against my bedroom wall.
 
3rd post in as many minutes!

I think I am due for my period. That's why stress is affecting me and I feel out-of-sorts. I had cramps this morning. Blech.

I told PunkRock last night that he makes me feel awesome. I was really happy and felt supported when he went along with me to the bank the second time and made the phone call when I asked him too. He's good husband material. He's been really positive this past week. I think it's a combination of things - him quitting smoking (its been a while now so the aggravating short tempered stage is long gone), his stress being lowered now that he has a job and is working again, and the fact that the financial meeting we had removes a lot of under-the-surface stress he might have been carrying subconsciously.

He agreed but said it's also that he's just happy because he's in love with me.

MELT!

I must say that I am getting a totally different vibe from him lately - he's just got this glow when he looks at me. It's not NRE, but LOVE. I feel loved by him, a lot.

That said, DarkKnight told me while out on our date night that he was feeling a little bit jealous that PunkRock got to sleep over the first night in my new bed. I told him we'd make up for it tonight - the 2nd night. :) He was half-joking - I don't think it was a big issue, but I was glad he articulated it to me. DarkKnight has been doing AWESOME at his weight loss lately and I am so proud of him for that. Ugh - I have not been doing awesome and I need to start counting calories again. I think I gained another 2 pounds.
 
While the delivery company should fix the ceiling fan, you can get replacement blades at minimal cost that won't require any electrical work (only 3 screws).

Sounds like a stressful and busy day. The new bed sounds divine (so jealous) :D
 
Back
Top