Sleeping Bags For Adults Cold Weather

...cicadas with occasional assistance from adults. Even the hallways had... it contained some large sleeping animal that might wake ... Of course he noticed. Adults noticed the wrong things constantly...The visiting team gathered its bags and left. Hoshiyomi walked ...suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere. Bags were zipped. Lockers slammed.... become weather. Yuto sat back down. The bench was cold through ...

...cicadas with occasional assistance from adults. Even the hallways had... it contained some large sleeping animal that might wake ... Of course he noticed. Adults noticed the wrong things constantly...The visiting team gathered its bags and left. Hoshiyomi walked ...suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere. Bags were zipped. Lockers slammed.... become weather. Yuto sat back down. The bench was cold through ...

...several tries but finally all bags and people were loaded.  ...section is where The Solarium adults only area is located.  ...cozy and make for excellent sleeping conditions.  It would have been...to make this room very cold or very hot.  The ... inability to see the weather conditions for the day.  When... would show real time weather or just a picture of... does show the daily weather.  The camera is somewhere on...

...felt almost suspicious considering the weather outside. Fern had spent most... cloths, and secured the bags they had brought with them. ... on one of the bags and slung it across her ... those green eyes again. Cold, focused and hollow. She rubbed ...who had already accepted that adults were sometimes strange creatures. "Because ...spells." "Uh huh." "Some involved sleeping." The girl narrowed her eyes. "...

... allure as if it were weather. They certainly did not stand... low, patient steadiness of a sleeping thing. Somewhere down the corridor, ... pile of old cardboard and bags of rubbish. No civilians. No .... A woman dropped her shopping bags, stumbling back on her heels .... The thought hit clean and cold. He crossed back to Apolline ..., and heavily skill-gated. Most schooled adults may apply for training only ...

... cooler and handed Buchanan a cold drink. "I hope you know ... all on...yay." The two adults sighed. They had a lot ... of excited students. Each had bags with them and though they ... all the thunder, people were sleeping. Except for Heather. Normally when ... quickly remedied. Due to the weather, everyone was wearing rain ponchos ... get a break in the weather. A few minutes without rain ...

Today marks one year since I started Mounjaro and this morning I weighed in at 69kg. 69kg - who? Me?? My starting weight was 119kg, so that’s 50kg gone in a year which genuinely does not feel real to say out loud. That’s literally an entire adult person off my body. A short adult admittedly, but still 😭 My brain still hasn’t fully caught up if I’m honest. A year ago I was wearing UK 22-26 clothing depending on the shop. Now I’m buying XS/S and somehow wearing a UK 6 outfit as I write this… which still feels absolutely ridiculous to me because in my head I still think I look exactly the same half the time. This has honestly been one of the hardest years of my life outside of the weight loss too. Work stress, personal stress, and everything in between… but weirdly this became the one thing I consistently showed up for while everything else around me felt chaotic. The obvious changes are there: - blood pressure went from stage 2 hypertension to normal - I don’t get out of breath walking upstairs anymore - no bouts of any sniffles, bugs, illnesses this year - I don’t snore anymore - my periods are regular again - I can walk for hours without pain/chafing - I hike now? Like I’m a hiker and I enjoy it. - my resting heart rate is so much lower - I can sit cross-cross apple sauce on my office chair But the weird and unexpectedly random NSVs have been the best part: - painful sit bones. I didn’t even know what sit bones were 😭 - constantly feeling cold now instead of sweating in mild British weather - crossing my legs comfortably without thinking about it - fitting into plane and train seats without anxiety - being nominated for the back middle seat in cars because I’m now “the small one” - dropping two shoe sizes - standard anklets fitting - being able to paint my own toenails and no longer spending a fortune in salons - walking into any clothes shop and knowing something will fit me That last one has strangely been the most emotional. I used to be the friend who’d immediately make a beeline for shoes, bags and accessories because I already knew the clothes wouldn’t fit me. I’d avoid certain shops entirely because I felt judged just walking in. Now I can just grab things off rails like a regular person and not mentally prepare myself for humiliation in a changing room. And contrary to popular belief about “Ozempic face”, most people keep telling me I look younger now, probably because inflammation has massively reduced and I’m sleeping properly for the first times in adulthood. I was a secret jabber for most of this year because the demonisation around these meds is still bizarre. The same people acting like it’s “the easy way out” weren’t the ones walking around with my blood pressure readings last year nearly at deaths door. This medication didn’t ruin my health… it helped me get my life back. Also, and I think more people need to say this out loud, sometimes the people closest to you are weirdly not the most supportive. Some people are comfortable with your weight loss until you become smaller than they expected you to become. I’ve had to learn to completely grey rock the “don’t lose too much weight!!” passive comments because respectfully… none of you were intervening when my health was objectively terrible lol. And yes before anyone says it, the skinnies are absolutely sick that we’re now skinny WITH personality and emotional depth. Terrible time for them really. I’m not fully done yet. I probably have another circa 10kg I’d like to lose slowly and then move into maintenance/strength/body recomposition. But the biggest thing that’s changed is my mindset and my happiness. I genuinely have a zest for life again. Everything feels lighter mentally as well as physically. I also think about the version of me that started this journey - a lot. I don’t feel shame towards her at all anymore. She was carrying so much more than weight. She was exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed and still somehow found the courage to finally prioritise herself after years of putting herself last. So I’m grateful to her really. She’s the reason I’m here now. Also, thank you to the contributors on this sub and the mods. I’ve become more of a silent reader over the last few months, but so many posts, comments, progress pics, random NSVs, advice threads and reassuring replies from strangers have genuinely helped me more than you probably realise. Reading other people’s experiences made me feel normal during moments where I thought “is this just me?” and gave me motivation on days where my brain was struggling to catch up. So this milestone feels partly thanks to this community too 🤍 If anyone is contemplating starting- don’t wait for life to become perfect first. I started during one of the most stressful periods of my life and it still changed everything. Anyway. 50kg down girl. Absolutely mad 🤍 ——— EDIT: Thank you so much for all the kind comments, messages and shared experiences 🤍 I genuinely didn’t expect this post to resonate with so many people. Also, to the handful of people deeply distressed by my clearly tongue in cheek use of the word “skinnies” - LOL! I promise there is no organised anti thin agenda taking place here 😏 tone policing not needed - please allow for a little sarcasm and humour outside the Reddit debate chamber. And for the avoidance of doubt, I am one of the skinnies now? So this is technically self referential commentary. 😌 submitted by /u/Some-Ad5770 to r/mounjarouk [link] [comments]

Alright, get comfortable - this is going to be a long one. First things first: I really like all of my perfumes and genuinely love many of them, so expect high scores across the board. That’s not because I’m a lenient critic - quite the opposite. Over the past few years, I’ve sampled extensively and only kept what resonated with me - the vast majority of what I tried was met with polite indifference and passed along to perfume-loving friends. Almost every decant here has been re-purchased at least once, and in a few cases, I enjoy them even more than the full bottles. The Collection Now, in alphabetical order by house name, let's begin: **Amouage Jubilation XXV** — 9.4/10 Dark, luscious blackberries crushed over pristine frankincense, resting on a base of glowing resins and clean oud, all drizzled with warmly spiced honey. It feels truly golden, as if pure white light were shining through the finest natural materials, forming a fragrance that shimmers and sparkles like jewels in the air. My decant comes from a bottle with “Jubilation XXV” written only on the cap. I’ve also tried newer batches, and to my nose, the differences are minimal. The older version opens with a slightly richer depth and a denser, more viscous feel, though it has never been a loud fragrance. By the one-hour mark, both versions are virtually indistinguishable and leave a gorgeous, lingering presence that lasts all day. **Amouage Reflection Man** — 8.6/10 Powdery, musky white florals, kissed by a mentholated freshness and resting on a bed of creamy sandalwood. Imagine stepping onto your patio on a crisp spring morning. As you hang freshly laundered white sheets, the air carries a cool, minty breath from the garden herbs nearby. Sensual jasmine climbs the sandalwood beams, its rich scent intertwining with powdery iris and fresh florals like a lilac-tinted morning dew. My decant is from 2018, and this time, I notice a much greater reduction in richness and longevity with recent bottles. Perhaps my skin is partly to blame for the fleeting performance, but unless I found an older bottle, I'd be hesitant to purchase more. **BDK Gris Charnel Extrait** — 8.9/10 Reclining on a plush lilac chaise longue in a dimly lit Middle Eastern café, we nibble on sweet figs. Sandalwood sculptures cast warm shadows, and the spiced aroma of cardamom-infused tea wafts through the air. The EDP has an airy elegance, but the Extrait is downright seductive. The addition of vanilla and patchouli give it a dark, molten viscosity that absolutely does it for me. Easily my most-complimented fragrance. People like to complain about the performance, but I've never had this issue. **Boucheron Ambre d'Alexandrie** — 8.1/10 The only blind-buy in my collection, but a definite keeper. Vanillic amber and fruity-spiced pipe tobacco on a gorgeous base of salty ambergris. An umami-tinged amber with an unexpected airy regality once the opening sweetness fades. Imagine Ambre Narguilé minus the cinnamon, or Khaltat Night without the dark cherry and dank patchouli. Some folk say Angel's Share, but not me - there's no doughy, saccharine booziness here. **Burberry High Tea 12%** — 8.3/10 Bright, herbaceous florals given a fresh, aromatic edge. The warmth of tonka. The comfort of chamomile. This is the scent of steam rising from a pot of herbal tea in a field of wildflowers. The opening leans feminine, but it shifts: white musks and unlit incense wisping around a base of mineralic ambroxan. One of my 'white-shirt scents' for when I just want to smell clean and well put-together. **Dior Homme Eau for Men** — 8.6/10 The only perfume in my collection I would call a 'signature scent'. I've been through four bottles and have single-digit mls left in my fifth. Uplifting citrus, suave spice and a wonderfully clean and transparent iris. No make-up bags here. Things settle on a base of woody-amber, with the heart of fresh iris still beating strongly. This man is confident and self-assured, yet soft and nurturing. Infinitely nostalgic. There was a time when I grieved it's discontinuation, but change is the only constant in this life. Rather than mourning what we’ve lost, we can find peace in the memories it helped to create. It now feels like something best left in the past - an embodiment of a younger me I’ve since outgrown. **Dior Homme Parfum (2014)** — 8.5/10 Imagine sipping a sweet cup of cocoa while sinking into a supple leather armchair. Violet drapes hang in the dim light, and wooden furniture echoes with the memories of many a pleasant night spent here. A soft, powdery iris, wrapped in plush leather. A radiant, velvet-textured muskiness that seems to glow from the skin like a lilac aura. Rich, creamy woods that deepen as it wears. The result is a sultry, indulgent warmth that few fragrances achieve. They don’t smell similar, but this dreamy, cocooning atmosphere takes me to a similar place as Gris Charnel Extrait, which I do prefer. **Diptyque Benjoin Bohème** — 10/10 It’s incredibly rare for a fragrance to move you beyond words. To stir the very soul. To shatter any preconceived notions about the insignificance of perfume and lift it into a realm where emotion and artistry intertwine. Benjoin Bohème does exactly that. This is a celebration of benzoin, and here, its crystals melt upon the skin, leaving an iridescent glow - radiant, like a pulsating aura of pure golden light. It’s both subtly sweet and richly balsamic, as though inhaling the essence of ancient, resinous trees that have stood for millennia. There’s something mysterious and almost sacred about it - an old family portrait shot in sepia, the soft flicker of candlelight illuminating dark wooden beams. You can perceive it, yet it remains just out of reach. It’s important to note that I have a vintage, cracked-glass bottle. I’ve sampled the new formulation extensively, and can attest that it’s different: less golden in aura, thinner in texture, more vanillic in its presentation of benzoin. It loses the inexplicable magic that my bottle shrouds me with. Heartbreaking, really. **Diptyque Philosykos EDP** — 9.2/10 If you're looking for a fragrance to transport you to a Mediterranean fig grove, look no further. The hyper-realistic scent of chlorophyll on your fingers after snapping a leaf. The milky sap that trickles down your wrist. The creamy flesh of a fig picked before its prime, only vaguely fruity. So fresh. So crisp. So classy. This is elegance done differently. An aura of clean, airy sophistication that truly needs experiencing to be understood. I live somewhere sub-tropical, so this is an easy reach on the most scorching of days. Unlike many, I have no qualms with its subtle presence - there's beauty in discretion. **ÉDIT(h) Kagamigoshi** — 9.7/10 If my essence were to be bottled, I can only hope this is how I’d smell. My favourite citrus, my favourite floral, and my favourite herb, partnered with the sort of gentle, alluring base that I adore. The juicy sweetness of mandarin orange, rendered with such purity. The aromatic freshness of juniper berries and clary sage, given a resinous brightness by the piney smoke of frankincense. An iris that glows with a soft, lilac luminescence, nothing at all powdery. White cedar and vetiver link their grounding, woody arms, harmonising perfectly with the rounded sweetness of vanilla. So natural. So understated. So me. Kagamigoshi feels like an indescribable fusion of my personality and scent - emerging from a place beyond language, where soul and smell exist with one purpose: to be rejoined. **Ex Nihilo Santal Calling** — 9.5/10 Simply the softest, silkiest, creamiest sandalwood I've ever experienced. Powdered with lilac florals, enlivened with radiant musks, and laced with a delicately sweet, nutmeg-infused vanilla. One of the more feminine-leaning scents in my collection, but as a 32-year-old bearded man, I have no issues with that. It's truly stunning and bliss-inducing every time I wear it. As one of the strongest performers on the list - second only to The Moon - I tend to avoid it in the heat. I’ve tried wearing it on days above 25°C, and even a single spray can feel a bit much. Most reviews don’t seem to agree, but the potency of Santal Calling catalyses with my skin in a rather alarming way. **Filippo Sorcinelli LAVS** — 8.2/10 Clean, ethereal, ecclesiastical incense is one of my favourite smells in the world. I'm yet to find one more evocative than this. Stone-cold cathedral walls, permeated with the scent of ancient rites. Waxy rosewood pews, spiced by centuries of quiet devotion. Pristine and austere, without the slightest hint of ashy smoke. I once wept before the paintings in the Vatican Museum, yet I’d never dream of hanging them in my home. It’s a similar experience here: a masterwork I revere from a distance, not one I'd spritz on casually. Such pure, non-smoky incense scents rarely have much longevity, but LAVS lasts for over 12 hours on my skin, though it remains very close for the duration. **Fragrance World Barakkat Satin Oud** — 7.2/10 The only dupe in my collection. Powdery violets, jammy rose, and sweet vanilla. It’s a little rough at first - as is to be expected - but calms down quickly. It smells like Turkish delight, though the dark woods in the base prevent it from feeling edible. Not as rich, dense, or oud-heavy as Oud Satin Mood, but very close in the air and performing almost as strongly. I won’t give it a percentage, but I once sprayed some on my wrist about half an hour before entering an MFK boutique and asked the sales staff if they recognized it - they immediately said Oud Satin Mood. I pulled out the Barakkat from my bag and we had a little laugh. I would never wear this out - it’s not the kind of scent profile I want representing me - but it’s my go-to for before sleep. **Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady** — 8.4/10 There’s nothing ladylike about the opening. It's ripe with a dark skankiness, like a piece of wood slowly rotting at the heart of a sleeping rose bed. How fantastic. The patchouli mellows to a rich, earthy spice, and the roses unfurl, deep red and opulent. Frankincense weaves throughout, its citrus-tinged smoke bringing clarity to the otherwise heady floral haze. POAL highlights just how crucial it is to test fragrances for yourself. The opening three hours make me feel like I’m in the wrong skin, but the drydown - which others often read as more rose or patchouli - is, for me, all clean, soapy musks and silvery, steam‑ironed incense, with the spiced rose only whispering in the background. It's my favourite part, I only wish it arrived sooner. **Frederic Malle The Moon** — 8.7/10 A composition executed so masterfully that Frederic Malle has split my rose-oud fragrance journey in two: those before The Moon, and those after. A potent blast of fruity oud and waxy, spiced saffron. A dusky, berry-infused rose that blooms upon a bed of supple leather. Mineralic plumes of smoky frankincense that bring an airy brightness, slicing through the richness. A mesmerizing scent, with truly ludicrous performance. I'm not usually one for assigning fragrances to specific weather, but this one demands the cold. Ice cold. One spray is enough, yet I'll still be smelling it all day, and into the next. **Guerlain Angelique Noire** — 9.2/10 So simple, yet so gorgeous. The bright green freshness of angelica and a brief pink pepper fruitiness, perfectly balanced by the sweet, cozy vanilla that Guerlain does so famously well. The sharpness of the greenery slowly gives way to the sweetness, but never disappears entirely. Even by day’s end, there’s nothing sickly or dessert-like about this. It stays fresh and classy, with a sparkly muskiness running through it that does lean a little feminine, but smells so elegant and sophisticated that it doesn’t phase me at all. Ani provides stiff competition, and perhaps suits me a little more, but Angelique Noire wears the crown as my favourite vanilla. **Guerlain Patchouli Paris** — 8.8/10 Angelique Noire was a slow burn; Patchouli Paris was not. The moment the Guerlain sales assistant fanned this in my direction, it was love at first sniff. Such a marvellous patchouli. It has all the traits people often claim to dislike - musty, damp, a little basement-leaning - but rendered in such a smooth, sexy way. This patchouli feels spherical, made clean and translucent by beautiful aldehydes and wrapped in a powdery iris that gives the whole composition such softness. As it dries, vanilla and ambergris make it balmy and lotion-like, while the mustiness gives way to a clean airiness with a velvety texture. Colour me crazy, but this pastel-toned, luxurious cleanliness takes me straight to the drydown of LV Imagination. The way the ambergris materials are handled feels strikingly familiar. **Hermès TdH Eau Vétiver Intense** — 8/10 Vetiver has never been one of my favourite notes, especially the green, rooty kind. I tend to prefer it when laced with some smoky depths. This was a gift, and I’ll admit I tried to hide my disappointment at first, but it’s grown on me to the point that it’s now one of my most commonly worn fragrances. It opens with a sharp blast of citrus and the sort of vetiver I often dislike, here given a pungent, peppery buzz and streaked with piney resins that feel unapologetically masculine. As the day goes on, the vetiver softens, warming into ambery woods and soapy patchouli. This man is self-assured and dependable, never putting off until tomorrow what can be accomplished today. I appreciate the structure and heft, while still staying fresh in the sunshine. It’s one of the few I reach for when I don’t feel like devoting much brainpower to my scent. **Jo Malone Myrrh & Tonka** — 7.5/10 The powdery sweetness of tonka, the jewel-like glow of myrrh, a brief whiff of aromatic lavender - all combining into a sultry, masculine charm. I love a myrrh that hums with a deeply resinous purr and a tonka that feels tactile, with a plush, lingering warmth. Here, we only get some of that. Perhaps I’ve just become a total snob, but I feel it leans a bit too smooth, too powdery, too thin in body. That said, I wear it all the time: for close-quarters evening moments when I want to smell smoky and seductive while keeping my scent discreet, it’s an easy reach. Whilst reading in bed, if I don't fancy smelling like a jammy rose, this will often be the one I choose. It’s never loud, yet lingers beautifully, with far greater staying power than most Jo Malone perfumes I’ve tried. **Jovoy Incident Diplomatique** — 8.8/10 Now this is my kind of vetiver: dark, smoky, and brooding. I picture a quiet man sitting alone in a shadowed bar long past closing, deep in thought, planning his next move. Mature, with a capital M. It didn’t click with me at first. I found it a little too dated, too dry. But over time, it’s become hard to imagine a vetiver-forward fragrance topping it. A dusting of bitter orange zest gives an immediate sense of maturity, quickly followed by a deep, smoky vetiver that barely resembles the greener styles. It stays fairly linear on my skin, with patchouli and sandalwood smoothing the edges and adding a gentle tenderness. That quiet warmth, pushing through the smoke, gives the whole thing a human quality - the moment a sombre mind drifts homeward, remembering the people waiting for him. That softness brings it very close to a love. **Jovoy Psychédélique** — 9.3/10 Many moons ago, this was unbearable to me - it presents patchouli in its rawest, dampest, soiliest form. Thankfully, tastes change, and it’s now one of my favourite smells in the world. Psychédélique is the first head of my chocolate-patchouli Cerberus - the fiercest of the three, reigning supreme over the ambered realm. To the untrained nose, expect a relentless onslaught of dark, green mustiness. But for those attuned to the note, a gorgeous vanillic sweetness quickly cloaks the darkness. The viscous amber builds in intensity, leaving a warm, resinous comfort infused with a smooth, gentlemanly charm. He’s dashing. He’s old-school. He’s timeless. Or she - I would relish the woman who smelt like this. It’s not at the top of my list, but something about Psychédélique has me in a chokehold I never want to escape. If I could keep only one for the rest of my life, it could very well be this. **La Sultane de Saba Ayurvedic EDP** — 8.7/10 A whiff of cooling, camphorous tiger balm, quickly opening into warm, cinnamon-dusted resins and sweet vanilla. This comes across as powdery and soothing rather than candy-sweet or dessert-like. Rosey florals keep the experience delicate, almost like an amber-infused body lotion, while the earthy depth of patchouli and soft woods bring a sexy plushness to what would otherwise just be a powdery amber. This is marketed as feminine, and it’s certainly not the sort of powerful, dominating oriental scent many men might gravitate towards, but it has a luxurious, balm-like quality that I find incredibly therapeutic. For a relative cheapie, it performs astonishingly well - I catch whiffs of sweet, resinous lotion all day. **L'Artisan Parfumeur Timbuktu** — 8.5/10 One of the more evocative scents in the collection, taking the mind to distant lands where smoky, ceremonial incense burns and exotic flowers bloom. A parched, cracked landscape where vetiver grows in its driest, dustiest form. Scrubbed animal hides hang in the scorching heat and sweet resins infuse the air with a warm, balsamic haze. It’s truly gorgeous stuff. The opening is a tad harsh, thickened with a ghostly mango note that evokes the bitter skin more than the sweet flesh. Yet somehow, Duchaufour has taken these heavy materials and given them a clean, ethereal soapiness. With the airiness of incense and echoes of sweetness, Timbuktu feels foreign yet familiar, severe yet inviting. It does stay quite close to the skin, but you wouldn’t want to fill a room with this. It’s grounding and introspective, a calming experience for both the wearer and those fortunate to catch a whiff. **Masque Milano Tango** — 8.9/10 An intoxicatingly rich, bright red amber, radiating warmth, passion, and lust. A cumin note up top gives a sensual, human warmth. It’s not dirty or sweaty, but evocative of bodies entwined in a dance of seduction. As the room heats up and desire builds, cinnamon, cardamom, and benzoin sweeten the air and bring an alluring spice. A lush jasmine note, sultry and narcotic, mirrors the quickening heartbeats. A powdery rose soon follows, encapsulating the moment of surrender, the culmination of flirtation into pure, uninhibited passion. As the tempo slows, the scent settles into a warm, earthy base, where hints of supple leather create depth while a touch of vanillic sweetness shimmers like the afterglow of intimacy. It’s almost as if the fragrance is doing a tango with itself - an evocative dance between sweet and spicy, dry and jammy, masculine and feminine. **Nasomatto Pardon** — 9.8/10 Pardon is deeply romantic. Not in a floral, rosey-sweet way, but in that dark, seductive, gentleman-in-a-candlelit-room way. When I first tested it, this is what I wrote: "Despite Nasomatto's secrecy about the notes, it's clear from the very first sniff that they've used a ton of patchouli - the damp dog, soily earth kind, and an oud that smells like something in the early stages of decay." I no longer experience it with such passionate distaste, but I can still understand why others might. The longer it dries, the more magical it becomes. The oud softens into a smooth, woody smoke, and the patchouli morphs into its dark chocolate variety - not sugary, but with a balsamic, shadowy, 90% cocoa richness. Warm spice, softer woods, and faint florals dance around the edges, giving texture to the core. No longer a swamp dog, but a regal hound of quiet authority, and the second, more noble head of my chocolate-patchouli Cerberus. He wears a three-piece suit and a top hat, with a dark brown velvet cloak draped effortlessly over his shoulders, stitched with threads of deep forest green. In one paw, he sips a cup of bitter cocoa, and in the other, he turns a polished oud bracelet, its rich aroma a reflection of his calm, commanding presence. **Nishane Ani** — 9/10 So much more than just a vanilla scent. Fiery ginger, sharp greenery, and thick citrus. Dense to the point of being alarming - unapologetically potent. This is not one to sniff too closely, as it will catch you in the back of your throat. Cooling spice, a berried juiciness, and the softness of rose cushion the intensity, preparing the stage for the main player: a gorgeously rounded, benzoin-infused vanilla that feels bottomless, shifting its facets depending on the weather. On the coldest days, patchouli steps forward with an earthy rawness, casting the vanilla in a darker, more mysterious light. In warmer air, the musky glow of ambergris becomes its dance partner, amplifying the richness and deepening the sweetness. As the hours pass, it only grows creamier, yet the resins keep it ambered and luminous - less basic cupcake, more jewel cloaked in molten indulgence. I avoid it in the heat or when I’ll be indoors for long stretches, but knowing that such a rich, layered vanilla sits on my shelf is an absolute delight. **Nishane B-612** — 8.6/10 The childhood memory of how Grandad used to smell after a fresh shave - mossy, lavender-laced, and faintly sweet - is deeply nostalgic. But fougères have never been a profile I’ve enjoyed on my own skin. That was until I discovered B-612. The lavender is sharp and aromatic; the oakmoss is dank, almost dirty. But then the cashmeran arrives. A note so difficult to describe until you’ve smelled it in isolation: mineralic, faintly metallic, like a freshly ironed jumper still holding warmth. This clean, modern airiness, paired with the creaminess of sandalwood and a subtle tonka sweetness, creates a ghost of a barbershop - all the classic components are present, yet rearranged into something entirely its own. Dense enough for the cold, fresh enough for heat. Beautifully masculine, yet entirely free from bravado. **Tiziana Terenzi Ursa** — 8.8/10 A damp, breathing forest floor. Moss and soil underfoot. The humid air thick with the scent of wet fur, animal hide, and a faint berry-scented sweetness. You can almost picture the bear of its namesake moving somewhere just out of sight, hidden among the dank undergrowth. The opening is unmistakably damp and animalic, rising from the skin like something untamed. It initially reminds me of Kilian's Straight to Heaven, but more of a debauched older brother. Ursa feels richer, deeper, more full-bodied, and on my skin, performs far better. The dampness softens into resinous wood - the animalic edge taking on the texture of worn leather. There’s nothing clean or polished about this, but it’s rich and atmospheric, with a timeless, vintage warmth. **Tom Ford Beau de Jour** — 8.2/10 A lavender so realistic that I become one with the flower. A minty coolness so bright it cuts through the purple hues, streaking the lavender with shades of chartreuse and emerald. An ambered patchouli so smooth you’d think the world’s most luxurious shaving foam had just materialized in your nostrils. It develops a soft ambered sweetness in the drydown, separating it from the powdery, hay-like sweetness we often find in fougères. This man is decisive, ambitious, and purposeful in all actions. His colleagues recognise him as their leader, yet to his friends, he’s just one of the boys. **Xerjoff 40 Knots** — 9.3/10 The most wildly evolving fragrance in my collection. The opening is odd and stays close to the skin, but the drydown is sensational and radiates with vigour. We’re standing at the harbour, waiting to board our yacht. A salty sea breeze carries the scent of coastal shrubs, a hint of citrus, and the whiff of a distant cypress forest (or is that an illusion of frankincense?). Now far from the coast, the fresh, powdery scent of the salty wooden decking mixes with the warmly spiced, floral perfumes worn by fellow passengers. As night approaches, we retreat to the yacht’s lavish interior - a room furnished in deeply coloured lacquered wood and sweetened with thick raw honey. A whiff of animalic hide enters through an open window and merges with the sweetness, giving me the impression of a long-forgotten treasure chest, sticky with the musk from the deep abyss, brimming with ambered jewels. I adore how new facets present themselves each time I wear it, and cannot for the life of me understand how some folk get either no freshness, or no sweetness - to my nose, there is a generous serving of both. **Xerjoff Alexandria II** — 9/10 I was repulsed by this when I first tried it. Truly repulsed. It smelt like a herd of invisible cows had parked directly inside my sinuses. I’m unsure what clicked (or unhinged…) within my olfactory, but years later, I no longer pick up on barnyard funk, just a sexy trail of rich, antique wood, made airy with a dusky rose and oddly nostalgic with powdered lavender. I totally get the references to the talc used to line a baby’s nappy, so make no mistake - it’s sharp and comes out screaming. But it’s in the drydown where it transforms: a transparent, glassy, fractionally sweet vanillic amber rises to the surface, softening the harshness. It’s no longer just a severe Egyptian ruler surrounded by sun-baked woods, but a gentler figure, with a trace of vanillic indulgence lingering on their lips. This subtle thread of sweetness woven through the shadows tempers the austerity and infuses it with an inviting warmth. It smells nothing like the notes would suggest and is possibly the most unique scent I’ve ever tried. Unparalleled longevity, even amidst stiff competition from its Xerjoff siblings. All perfume should be tested on skin, but Alexandria II demands it. On paper, the woods remain bitter and medicinal, the sweetness totally muted. On warm skin, it blooms spectacularly. **Xerjoff Dolce Amalfi** — 8.7/10 An entirely unique spiced-fruitiness, given lift with some clean incense and resting upon a quasi-gourmand, balmy vanilla. The comparisons to Juicy Fruit gum are totally valid, but this is confectionery for adults. Grown. Sexy. Brimming with an exotic sweetness that makes you question whether such deliciousness is fit for human consumption. If I wasn’t such a fiend for variety, I could wear this anytime the sun is shining and be perfectly content. Though that’s not to say it’s a light freshie - it’s rich, dense, and incredibly long-lasting - but has a playful, flirtatious edge that I just think smells wonderful in the heat. **Xerjoff Naxos** — 9.1/10 Naxos, Naxos, Naxos. What is there to say that hasn't already been said? The scent that opened my olfactive third eye to how spectacular perfume could be. An effervescent dance between lemon and lavender - not sharp, but soothing, like slowly dissolving a herbal lozenge on your tongue. A honey note that swells with a golden richness, tempered by jasmine's luscious depth and cinnamon's warm spice. A base of vanilla-infused tobacco, rich enough to leave you weak at the knees. Dripping with sensuality. Intoxicating to the point of delirium. **Xerjoff Richwood** — 9.6/10 After a fleeting burst of bright citrus and a generous dose of fresh pink rose, the patchouli steps into focus. It so often risks overwhelming a composition with vintage mustiness (I’m looking at you, Psychedelique), but here, there's none of that. It’s rich and full-bodied, like the finest compost, tinged with a pleasantly medicinal, wine-like tang. The buttery texture of sandalwood and a resinous vanilla slowly engulf this earthiness, forming what feels like creamy ribbons of ambery white chocolate. An absolute delight to wear - as smooth as silk, and the third, most approachable head of my chocolate-patchouli Cerberus. It sits in the same wheelhouse as Coromandel, but where that leans sweeter and more resinous, wearing like a shade of beige, Richwood is rosier, brighter, and feels like tones of light caramel. It also performs significantly better on my skin. **Xerjoff Starlight** — 8.7/10 One of the most gorgeous openings in all of perfumery - photorealistic to the point of disbelief. Fresh, green cardamom pods, given a sparkling brightness and adorned with a crystal-clear amber. This is not heavy and syrupy like something you’d find in an Iranian dessert shop, but luminescent, with a lightweight transparency. The smooth nuttiness and sweet, ambered spices are beautifully balanced by a clean cedar note that arrives in the base. I don’t usually enjoy almond notes - Xerjoff Italica being a prime example - but there’s none of that stomach-churning, toffee-imbued, lactonic sourness here. It’s majestically composed. If only the cardamom carried through to the base, this would be scoring even higher. **Xerjoff Zefiro** — 8.9/10 We’re sitting beneath a bergamot tree in an ancient Roman piazza, dressed in all-white linen. The aroma of fresh spice and green herbs mingle with the chilled white wine that swirls in our glass. The scent of divine incense beckons us, and upon entering the sacred space, we gaze at the grandeur of the architecture and breathe in the scent of timeworn lacquered pews. Rousing us from deep reflection, a monk walks by, chanting hymns and swinging a bowl of warmly spiced, honeyed incense. I went on an incense binge a little while ago, sampling as many as I could find, and this was my clear favourite. **Complete Ranking** Diptyque Benjoin Bohème — 10/10 Nasomatto Pardon — 9.8/10 ÉDIT(h) Kagamigoshi — 9.7/10 Xerjoff Richwood — 9.6/10 Ex Nihilo Santal Calling — 9.5/10 Amouage Jubilation XXV — 9.4/10 Jovoy Psychédélique — 9.3/10 Xerjoff 40 Knots — 9.3/10 Diptyque Philosykos EDP — 9.2/10 Guerlain Angelique Noire — 9.2/10 Xerjoff Naxos — 9.1/10 Nishane Ani — 9/10 Xerjoff Alexandria II — 9/10 BDK Gris Charnel Extrait — 8.9/10 Masque Milano Tango — 8.9/10 Xerjoff Zefiro — 8.9/10 Guerlain Patchouli Paris — 8.8/10 Jovoy Incident Diplomatique — 8.8/10 Tiziana Terenzi Ursa — 8.8/10 Frederic Malle The Moon — 8.7/10 La Sultane de Saba Ayurvedic EDP — 8.7/10 Xerjoff Dolce Amalfi — 8.7/10 Xerjoff Starlight — 8.7/10 Amouage Reflection Man — 8.6/10 Dior Homme Eau for Men — 8.6/10 Nishane B-612 — 8.6/10 Dior Homme Parfum (2014) — 8.5/10 L'Artisan Parfumeur Timbuktu — 8.5/10 Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady — 8.4/10 Burberry High Tea 12% — 8.3/10 Filippo Sorcinelli LAVS — 8.2/10 Tom Ford Beau de Jour — 8.2/10 Boucheron Ambre d'Alexandrie — 8.1/10 Hermès TdH Eau Vétiver Intense — 8/10 Jo Malone Myrrh & Tonka — 7.5/10 Fragrance World Barakkat Satin Oud — 7.2/10 Phew! I’ve been working on this list for a few weeks now - testing here, tinkering there - and thoroughly enjoyed every second of it… right up until the dreaded scores. Please take the numbers with a pinch of salt - a ±0.2 range, if you will. Passing definitive judgment on a selection of scents I cherish so dearly is no easy task. I agonised over the scoring, wanting it to reflect my true feelings as closely as possible, while also recognising how mood-dependent my preferences can be. I'm certain about my top five, confident in sixth through tenth, and as satisfied as I can be with the lower-to-mid rankings. Those scoring between 8.8 and 9.1, however, are where my feelings tend to fluctuate. Much like a gardener marveling at the beauty of their favourite blooms, each fragrance holds a piece of my soul: some provide more life-force than others, but all are adored for the place they occupy in the collection. I hope this sparks a lively conversation: Which of these smells completely different on your skin? Are any of them overrated - or perhaps underrated - in your opinion? If you could keep just three from this list, which would you choose? I’d love to hear it all! submitted by /u/OliveEyes94 to r/fragrance [link] [comments]

My son is heading on a roughly 12-15 mile hike over two days. He has to pack his water for the trip. I am estimating about 2 gallons for two days. What is the best way for him to carry it? We usually use Nalgene or Vitamine water bottles and filters. Edit- no water is available on the hike we are told. It is is big bend west Texas, so dessert and about 8000 feet. Edit2- I am in agreement about the concern and the weight. I am an experienced hiker and this seems like a lot. My son is on the bigger side at 110+ lbs but still with the water his pack will be weighing 30-40% of his weight which is way over the 20% I like. I have raised concerns with the scout masters to hear what they recommend. There are smaller kids going so they may rethink a lot of this. Yes big bend may close some sites due to water shortages. They have other sites reserved or may postpone the trip. UPDATE: the hike happend. Everyone made it back alive. A little worse for ware but overall a good trip. They were very cold but some of that was a learning experience about proper clothing, sleeping prep and taking the weather seriously. They drank every bit of water they had. My son carried 6 liters. He had 2 camel backs and three vitamine water bottles. His pack was just under 30 lbs. other kids carried a little less weight. The adults on the trip carried more weight. The scout troop ended up sending out detailed packing list, added a test hike with gear to test the kids. They also did a group pack, where they took their packs, went through everything and weighed the bags. I am sure the kids took something away from the experience but still wouldn’t trust them to plan and execute a trip. It would They said the trip was challenging, and I could see this trip being nearly impossible with heat. Thanks all for the concern and the guidance. submitted by /u/Traditional_Bake_787 to r/camping [link] [comments]

The party was two weeks ago. I stole a few beers when the adults weren’t looking and shared them with Lucy Sitkins away from the crowd. She drank hers greedily as we sat beneath the bough of a low tree, speaking low so no passers-by could hear. Every time we whispered, we tilted our faces a little closer and closer. There was a moment where I thought she was going to rest her head on my shoulder as she told me about how she wanted to be a vet, and my heart skipped as I debated putting my arm around her waist. It was all cut short when her father, Larry, stood in front of everyone in the party and forced a beer can down his throat. I didn’t see it. I only heard the cries that had us both sitting upright beneath the branches. By the time we got back to the party the adults were escorting the kids away and ambulance sirens were fast approaching. Dad was there and he told me to take my little sister home. The grim and frightening look on his face made me forget Lucy and the smell of beer on her breath. I try hard to remember if she ate from the barbecue. Sometimes I think she didn’t, other times I swear I can picture her biting into a burger and it’s so vivid I think it must be a memory. It’s moot either way. I’ll never see her again. I felt a little gross when I went into school the next day and asked around if the stories about her dad were true. When my father got home the night of the party, he hadn’t spoken to me or Mom. He just went to bed and didn’t tell us what happened. Come morning, I saw some of the older kids by the school gates and overheard them talking. The details made my stomach churn, but I wanted to know more. I didn’t want to act all excited about something terrible, but this felt like the kind of thing people would be talking about for years. Larry Sitkins had swallowed a beer can. “Shoved it down his throat like a fucking boa constrictor eating an egg!” At least that’s how one kid described it to me. There was more, of course. He’d praised Satan before slitting his own throat. Gotten piss drunk and fallen hard onto the ground while chugging a beer. Tried to catch the can mid-air. Someone had punched him mid-sip. There were a lot of variations on what happened and how, but they were only theories that got turned into rumours. A lot of us were just trying to make sense of it. Larry was a pretty run-of-the-mill guy. He was a landscaper who made lame jokes at kids’ birthday parties. He was about as non-descript as they came, at least as far as a bunch of teenagers were concerned. We got halfway through the day before Mr Straub shut the bleachers on his neck. It was in front of the cheerleaders. There were ambulances again. Crying girls and boys and even some of the teachers. Most of them just looked confused, except for Mr Straub. I managed to catch a glimpse of him as I jogged over to find out what all the screaming was about. He looked empty of all thoughts and emotions, with his head set at a crooked angle. I figured that was how people must look when dead, but apparently, he’d been like that during the act. He’d walked up, perched his neck between the slatted benches, and hit the remote button to slide the bleachers closed. Whole time, he was just slack-jawed and stupid looking, even as the metal mechanism crunched vertebrae and cartilage. I later learned Larry had been like this too, when he killed himself. He was getting ready to pop the tab on a fresh beer when he simply stopped, looked up to the sky, then forced the whole thing down his throat in a single world-shattering moment. I didn’t know it back then, but there were others just like Larry and Mr Straub. A barista in a coffee shop steamed half the skin off her arm while keeping eye contact with a guy in the drive-thru. A doctor at the local clinic used a biopsy needle to inject air straight into his own heart. Lots of people shot themselves, but not one of them aimed for the head. That’s a weird touch, if you think about it. These people obliterated their torsos or limbs with high-powered rifles at point-blank range. No reason offered. Just a vacant expression as they deleted bits of their bodies and left nothing but ragged stumps. There was no school the next day, which was the only real clue I got about how panicked the local authorities were. Wouldn’t be long before the national authorities joined in on the panic too, but that would come later. That morning, my parents left the house at 9:30 for a meeting at the town hall ,and they dropped me off at my Grandma’s on the way. I waited for them to leave before I told my grandma I was heading out. It was a hot day and she only nodded her approval as she sat reading with my sister. She hated seeing me play video games and always encouraged me to go make my own adventures outside. I had no plans. Didn’t even want to see any of my friends. I thought a lot about Mr Straub’s face as I crossed empty farmers’ fields and walked into the woods. I’d been to an open casket funeral once. It was for Father Dennis, who’d christened me as a baby, not that I remember anything about him except his stony face resting gently in the soft white folds of his casket’s interior. That seemed so long ago, and so sterile that the thought of it was a bit sad but not a whole lot else. But Mr Straub’s face had frightened me with his swollen lips and bulging eyes. Alive one moment and dead the next, with only pain to separate the two. And yet he’d looked so bored hanging there from his own broken neck, still wearing those ridiculous red shorts he always had on no matter the weather. It took time to recognize that seeing a dead body had freaked me out. I felt like it shouldn’t have messed with me as much as it did, and I guess that’s why there was a little bit of anger mixed in with all those thoughts in my head. It’s also why I pushed on through the woods until the trees began to thin, marching in the humid summer heat until my t-shirt was soaked and my legs ached. I wanted to feel tired. Wanted it so the only thing I could think of were my throbbing hamstrings and sunburnt forehead. It ended when I reached the tracks. Shaggy rocks and boulders rose steeply on the opposite side. Only other ways to go were left into town or right into a dark tunnel, its mouth bristling with ivy. At least the air coming from it was cold, so I took a second to stand and catch my breath, feeling the sweat cool and evaporate as the wind billowed gently out of the darkness. I wasn’t stupid though. I paid close attention in case I heard the sound of any passing trains, and when I did hear one, I raced off the tracks as quick as I could. It honked as it came past. Another day and I might have worried that I was gonna get in trouble for playing on the rails, but all I could really think of was the thing I’d seen lying by the tracks. It’d been lit up by the train as it came roaring out of the tunnel, not far from the entrance. In the strange silence after the train had gone, there was only the dim light of the setting sun to see inside the tunnel, and everything looked the same. Old clothes. Broken bottles. Discarded crates. Trash strewn around wherever it found space. But I knew what I’d seen in the harsh white light of the train’s passing beams, and it was a hell of a lot more than garbage. I’d seen a man. He was lying face down. There’d even been a hand, bright and pale like the moon in the night sky. I was sure of it. I didn’t know what to do, not right away. I was afraid and didn’t want to go inside, but I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t seen anything either. I tried shouting to them. If someone down there heard me, they gave no sign of it. Wasn’t until I actually stepped into the darkness and let my eyes adjust that I confirmed there really was a man lying down in there. He was draped across the tracks, and he didn’t have any legs. And judging by the way the blood stains had turned the colour of shit, he’d been there for a while. Hell, half-a-dozen trains must’ve gone right over him thinking he was just an old bit of cloth or something. That’s if they saw anything at all. In that time he’d dried out a little. He wasn’t a mummy or anything, but the blood on his stumps and coming out his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup. I was sobbing by this point. Crying hard as I tried to make sense of what I was meant to do, while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair on me. There was a moment where I could almost feel myself wanting to be a kid again. A proper one. Little. One who doesn’t have to do things. One who can get upset and scream and run away. I’d only just started to appreciate how badly I’d been messed up by seeing Mr Straub, and then God went and dropped that kind of nightmare in my lap. Teeth stained black with blood and open eyes that looked at nothing. It felt like a nightmare. Not just the moment with the body, but everything else too. Everything since that beer beneath the tree had felt like it wasn’t part of reality anymore. But nightmares end. I was outside, gasping, vomiting, crying my eyes out, when I heard something shuffle in the tunnel I’d just run out of. Part of me thought that a sound must mean someone was alive and close by and that meant I wasn’t alone. But another part of me thought something else entirely. It was the part of me that took over and stopped me crying or making any more noise. My mouth turned dry as a desert and all of a sudden I was no longer hot all over, but cold. Freezing cold. And my legs were backpedalling away from the tunnel with short, quiet, steps. The noise persisted. It was the shuffle of something getting dragged over gravel and old plastic bags. It had a rhythm to it that was slow. The word that springs to mind is one I got taught in a biology class a long time ago. Locomotion. Something down there was moving. It was moving towards me. It sounded slow and broken and feeble but that didn’t matter. Somehow, even though I knew it was completely insane, I just knew what was gonna come out of that tunnel. I knew it the way the rabbit knows the wolf, or the ant knows the spider. But still, when I saw him crawl out of the dark and into the light, I screamed so loud I’d have a sore throat for the next few days. It was the man from the tracks and even though he moved, he was not alive. I tried telling myself that he couldn’t have been dead because only living things move, but that was horseshit. He’d dragged his bloody legless torso with one working arm while the other lay dislocated across his back, the fingers of both hands curling as he heaved himself along. And that face. That same empty gawking expression, just like Mr Straub’s. He wasn’t alive. He was a dead thing and that made him some kind of impossible monster. I turned and ran screaming through the trees. Whole time, I could only think of the thing that was behind me and was trying to close the distance. It didn’t matter that it was slow. Didn’t matter that I ran for over an hour. Didn’t even matter that I wasn’t sure if I knew my way home or was even running in the right direction. All that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other until there was nothing left inside me. Time turned funny. Seconds moved in strange staccatos until eventually I collapsed on legs made of rubber. Then I dragged myself into an old tree hollow to hide and that was where I lost all consciousness. - When I woke up, the sun had set and it was dark. I vomited some, then found my way back to the beaten path and stumbled achingly through the cold night air back to my Grandma’s farmhouse. Dad was sick. My Grandma screamed something to this effect at me as she held down his right arm, while my mother tried to grip his head in her blood-slick hands. He resisted with dumb determination. My little sister cried, watching the scene like a shellshocked soldier. There was grunting and sobbing and suddenly, a bang. Then a puff of plaster rained down onto my head and everyone began to yell and shriek a little louder. Dad had a gun. That was what my Grandma was trying to wrestle out of his hands. She held a knife and that’s why there was blood, but I didn’t know whose it was. I wasn’t sure what she was planning to do with it until she tried to use it to cut his trigger finger off. The scuffle resulted in another bang and a window exploded outwards. I finally ducked and grabbed my sister, rushing her into another room, but there were three more explosions and each one broke something inside me. By the time I heard my name being called, I was half-deaf and twitching at things that weren’t there. My sister pleaded for me to come back, her pink fingers grasping for me as I put her down. But my mother was shouting for me to come help, and I wanted to keep my family safe. She told me to get something to tie Dad up while she and my Grandma used both arms to pin each of his wrists to the ground. His hand bled weakly as my Grandma used every inch of her strength to simultaneously pin him and stop the flow. He thrashed slowly beneath them, his movements languid and easy, but I could tell it was a struggle for them to keep him down. As I ran to the garage I saw the gun on the ground with Dad’s severed finger nearby. I kicked it out of reach before returning shortly with the rope my Grandma used to tie the garage door open during hot summers. Mom tied the knots. My Grandma tried talking to my Dad and it was one of the few times in my life I saw her as the woman who’d once changed his diapers. She was so soothing and tender and her constant muttering that everything would be okay. Seemed so fragile. She was scared for him. Mom just did everything in her power to wrestle some safety out of the moment. Only once his arms were securely behind his back and she was confident he wasn’t breaking free did she stand back, put her hands behind her, and then immediately hunch forward and sob. “Call an ambulance,” my Grandma told me as she walked into the other room to get my sister. Before I got the phone, I briefly hugged my Mom who didn’t seem to notice. I risked a glance at my Dad who didn’t look at anything at all. Dead eyes gazed vacantly at nothing as he fought to free his arms. When he finally looked at me, it was no different to how he looked at the floor or the wall. - I didn’t go to school the next day either. Some men from the government came to take Dad in the morning, and Mom ordered me to my room when they arrived. She asked them a thousand questions, but their replies were short and stern. All I managed to overhear were a few muffled phrases. Please stay put Ma’am. Someone will be in contact with you shortly. When I ran to my window to look at them walking down the drive I saw that they all wore masks. One of them saw me staring. I thought he was going to wave, but he didn’t. There was a biohazard symbol on their clothes. After they left, Mom focused on making dinner and looking after my sister. She kept me close the whole time, barking anxious questions whenever I tried to leave the room. Where are you going!? Just the bathroom. Oh. Okay then. It felt like she was painting normality onto tissue paper, desperately afraid of breaking it. I tried my best to seem like I was okay. Last thing I wanted was to feel like some kid who needed his mommy. We mostly just talked about mundane things but it was hard for both of us. The only time the atmosphere seemed to change was when she asked me something strange half-way through dinner. “Did your father… when you both went hunting a few months back, what did you do with the meat?” “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Dad took care of all that. Why?” “The men who took him asked a whole bunch of questions about it.” Then, with a fragile smile, “have you done your homework? They told me your teacher would send you some assignments online…” Just like that, the thin pretense of normality came back. ButI was left with a wriggling feeling in my stomach. It didn’t go away as the evening marched on. In fact, it only grew worse until I found myself in bed rolling from side to side and thinking about Mom’s question. The men who’d bundled Dad off hadn’t seemed like the kind who messed around. They must have had some idea what was going on, so why ask about meat? On some level, I knew the moment she’d asked me why it was relevant. Dad loved to hunt and he always brought meat to parties and barbecues. Wasn’t it obvious? He’d brought something back from the woods, hadn’t he? I hadn’t gone hunting for a long time. Nearly three months. Every time he’d asked I’d refused and I think he knew why. On the very last trip, Dad shot three deer but we only brought back two. One for us. One for the town barbecue. The third he shot but we left it on the forest floor because by the time it had died I was pale and shaking and even Dad couldn’t keep the tremor out of his voice. Neither of us had expected the deer to stand up on its hind legs and walk towards us like a man, its gait a heavy and broken thing as it lumbered over the forest floor. And it had kept coming even after Dad shot it six more times. One of the rounds struck it in the head, but still it shambled forward on two misshapen legs as its brains painted the ferns a pestilent grey. When it finally fell, even Dad had gone pale and in the silent aftermath I had to go off and be sick in a bush. After that we cut the trip short. Dad walked me gently back to the truck where the two deer we’d shot and trussed earlier that day lay waiting in the pickup. I don’t think either of us even remembered they were there until later. He’d still ask if I wanted to head out with him each weekend, but he never seemed surprised when I made some excuse. The only time we talked about it was not long before the barbecue when he drove me to school one day. He didn’t deal with it head on. He skirted the topic. Sometimes deer get sick, he’d told me. A little like old folks do. Remember Grampa? He got real scary towards the end, didn’t he? Well deer get sick too. But we don’t have to worry. Same way you couldn’t catch what Grampa had, well we can’t catch what the deer have. Us humans are safe. Just… just an uncomfortable part of nature. It had come outta the blue, or at least it’d seemed like it. I figured it was Dad’s way of trying to get me back onboard with hunting. I knew he liked me going with him. I’d liked it too, at least until I’d seen that deer walk towards me on two legs. But lying in my bed that night after Mom had gone to sleep, I started to wonder if maybe he hadn’t really been trying to convince me. Maybe he carried a little doubt in himself about something he was gonna do. What if he’d been trying to convince himself it was okay? Two deer. I tried remembering what they’d been like. I hadn’t checked them after we got in the truck. Why would I? Seemed as normal as any others as we tied them down, but I hadn’t really been paying attention either. I’d been hunting since I was seven. Helping Dad was automatic to me. And to top it off, I hadn’t known what I was meant to be looking for. I squirmed beneath the sheets and tried so hard to remember every detail of that trip. Most of all I tried to remember what the first two deer Dad had shot were like. They’d gone down so quick, they’d seemed normal. But Grampa had been sick with Alzheimer’s a long time before he got scary, and I had to figure the same could be true of those deer. Who was to say the one on hind legs was the only sick creature in the woods that day? I couldn’t have forced these thoughts out of my head with a crowbar. At some point I accepted I wasn’t getting any sleep that night and I settled down to torture myself some more until I realised it didn’t have to be that way. Dad had an old freezer in the shed and he sometimes kept meat in there. Not for long, and usually not for eating. He’d use it for things he wanted to skin or try and make a trophy out of tt, which he rarely did since Mom didn’t like that kind of thing in the house. But if the deer weren’t in the freezer in the kitchen or the garage, then they might be in the shed. And if I did open up that chest and saw two deer bodies in there, that meant whatever was going around and making people hurt themselves couldn’t have come from our little hunting trip. I snuck out my room as quietly as I could. Mom was on the phone with my Grandma and she was crying. I stopped briefly by her door and listened to see if maybe they knew something I didn’t, but after she started talking about how scared she was I just felt bad and moved on. At least it meant she was too busy to notice me creeping down the stairs. I never liked the shed at the end of the yard. It was rarely used, even by my Dad who kept the lawn mower and some old junk in there. It wasn’t the kind of place you kept food but I had this feeling he didn’t keep these deer with the rest of the meat he got from hunting. As I opened the backdoor and looked over the shadow-covered yard I found myself thinking about the tunnel and what I’d seen back there. With everything that had happened since, I’d done a good job of convincing myself it’d never really happened. The man with no legs who dragged himself out of the darkness had become little more than a half-remembered nightmare. A moment out of time that was incompatible with all logic and reason. But suddenly it was back with me. All the emotions and thoughts that raced through my head as I’d stared at his rotten flesh and glassy eyes. The walk to the shed wasn’t easy. I fought the urge to turn around the entire way there. Each step was like walking on feet made of lead. At the door, I paused with my hand poised by the lock. The house seemed so distant behind me, and I became painfully aware nobody knew I was alone and out in the dark. Inside was nearly pitch black. My phone helped me light it up a little, but I didn’t touch the nearby switch in case Mom saw it from her window. Cobwebs hung low from the ceiling, and shadows crawled across the floor and walls as I moved closer to the freezer. The entire time I kept expecting something to happen. I even imagined that deer rising from beneath the lid, pushing it open to stand unnaturally tall on its hind legs where it looked down at me with the same dead eyes I’d seen in my father. The thought scared me so bad I nearly hyperventilated myself straight into a panic attack, but before I had time to really worry about any of that I found my hand on the freezer latch. I pushed it open and looked inside. The misty vapours cleared to reveal a pile of meat and fur encrusted with ice. There was only one head visible, but I so badly wanted confirmation that there were two animals in there that I took a deep breath and reached in to try and pry some of it loose. Some of it came away from the sides with a sound like duct tape, but no matter how deep I rooted around in that mound of bone, antlers, and rock-hard flesh, I couldn’t see a sign of the second deer. Had Dad really served everyone sick meat? Was that really why Larry Sitkins, Mr Straub, and all those other people had killed themselves? The thought made me feel ill. I slammed the freezer shut and walked back to the door in a daze, trying with all my might to swallow the painful weight that settled in my gut. I had one foot outside when the freezer door rattled against the latch. The entire world spun around me. My heart sank and my skin froze in a sensation that was growing increasingly familiar. I turned to face the sound, both hands braced against the door, and watched as the hatch slammed into the lock once more. The light inside the chest came on for the briefest of moments and I glimpsed thrashing fur and teeth. Then it happened again, and again, and each time I saw bits of hoof and bone and strange musculature that frightened me so deeply I fell down onto my ass and didn’t even realise. When the latch finally gave way, the lid flew open and stayed there. Light poured out of the box and I waited, breath held, for that thing to emerge. To come roaring out of sight and bear down towards me on unnatural legs. But nothing happened. The silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity until, at last, there was a crash louder than any before and the entire freezer rocked back and forth and slowly fell over. The deer, or parts of it, fell out with a hard, wet, thump. Bits of its chin and face shattered on the hard packed ground, sending little shards of meat and bone skating across the floor on melting streaks of blood. Some of them even reached my feet. The thing inside moved with the sound of snow crunching beneath your feet. Its thick neck and broken head twisting side to side, scanning the shed’s interior with faulty eyes. I’ve never seen anything move like that. Not before or since. This was worse than the man in the tunnel. Worse by a thousand times. The deer was still mostly frozen but some impossible force was making fight the crystallised water in its own cells and the result was skin that ripped like tissue and muscles that cracked and crunched as they tried to flex and contract. It lifted its head and tried to scream. The breathy sound that left its fuzzy black lips made my heart start skipping beats while my bladder emptied. I couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop myself. And when I looked down and saw pieces of melting flesh start to writhe and wriggle, I tried with all my might to stifle the cry building up in my throat, but it still escaped as a desperate, high pitched whine. The deer turned its head towards me with a violent swing. Another breathy shriek and then it began to thrash its stiff and frozen legs in a terrifying attempt to get closer. To say it had a predatory look would be inaccurate. Anyone who’s seen a predator in action knows that nature is mostly indifferent when it kills. A bear tears into its prey with the same dull look of someone opening their McDonalds. Predators don’t hate the things they hunt. But this thing. I could feel its hatred. Its malice. It was nothing like what I’d seen in my Dad’s eyes or even the eyes of the man in the tunnel. But it had spent months in that box, hadn’t it? This was the disease when you skipped three months ahead. Anger. Hatred. Jesus Christ, I couldn’t even say if it was gonna eat me. That’s what you think when you see a zombie, right? It’s gonna try and take a big bite outta you. But this frozen clump of hair and meat and braying lips dragged itself across the floor with an expression like murderous rage. The look of someone ready to beat another living thing to death using its own hands if it had to. Unable to face it a moment longer, I dragged myself back onto my feet and fled, shutting my eyes as I entered the cold night air. I made it three steps before I slammed into my Dad. - It was like I’d run full speed into a tree. I bounced back and hit the earth, pain flaring up my coccyx as my father loomed over me. He’d felt cold for the brief moment where we’d made contact. My mind blocked out the sound of something hideous scrambling in the shed behind me, and the entire world narrowed until it was just the face of the man who’d raised me, looking down with pale dead eyes. “Dad?” He swallowed, then briefly examined his hands. “I think I’m dead,” he muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. “When did I die?” I pulled myself up and grabbed his hand. He was cold, but his pulse was racing. I could even see the veins in his forearms throb sickeningly. “Dad? Are you okay?” “They told me I’m sick,” he said, his eyes gazing vacantly at the empty space behind me. “I think they’re right. But there’s more.” He looked at me, the intensity of his gaze so powerful that I let go of his hand and took a step back. For the first time in my life, I was scared of him. “I’m not alone in here,” he said, his voice pleading for help. Slowly, his expression twisted into a grotesque mask of agony and desperation. “Oh Jesus! It isn’t just me in here!” I tried to move but he was a big man, and his arms wrapped around me like steel bands. “Dad,” I cried, struggling to pull myself loose as he sobbed louder and louder. “Dad! Jesus! You gotta let me go there’s…” The shed door burst open. I managed to twist around just enough I could see what came out, and I felt an urgent terror crawling up my flesh. The deer had pulled itself loose from the freezer, and it now stood in the doorway on two legs. Its body looked all wrong in that posture, like when you twist the limbs around on a doll. Probably not far from the truth, thinking about it. Dad didn’t react, but I began to scream as the nightmare coalesced around me. My father gripping, holding me in place as that horrible thing lurched towards me on two legs. It moved like claymation or a puppet show gone wrong, but it was quicker than I’d feared. As each strep brought it closer, I found myself losing what little control I had. I started to scream. Started to shriek. I beat at my father with my fists, but he didn’t budge an inch. My clenched hands just bounced off his strong shoulders, and it was like I was trying to hurt a punching bag. I started to swear too. Started to scream things I thought were bad, then worse, then so bad I’m not even sure I can blame other people for putting those words in my head. I told my Dad I hated him. Called him a son of a bitch. Called him even worse. All that commotion got the attention of others. Neighbors’ lights started coming on. My mom emerged from the backdoor, wrapping her robe around herself as she squinted at us in the dark. “What the hell is going on!?” she cried as she stumbled towards us, but when she saw that deer, she started screaming too. I don’t know why but I thought that other people appearing would help somehow. That as two, three, half-a-dozen people came stumbling into the open lawns, peering over waist-high fences, it’d stop the slow but inevitable onslaught of that monster. It did no such thing. I had to listen to their confused shouts and cries while gesturing and begging for help, the entire time the sound of the creature over my shoulder getting closer and closer. Meanwhile, my hands tried to pry away my father’s thick arms but each time I got leverage he simply flexed and his grip tightened around me. He was muttering something the whole time, but I couldn’t hear it. Finally, my Mom screamed and ran swinging an old rake at the space behind me. I heard the impact. The splintering of the wooden handle. Then she stumbled backwards and I had to twist to get a look at the deer that was now just six or seven feet away, the spokes of a rake still sticking out of its face. The monster looked right at me and opened its mouth and I swear to fucking God it was gonna talk, but right then someone shouted, “For the love of God Alice, get away from that thing!” Alice was my mother’s name, and she fell to the floor just seconds before an explosion broke the night, silencing all voices and shattering the deer’s head like a crystal ball hitting the ground. My heart raced so fast I thought for a moment I was gonna die. Then I looked down at Dad and finally heard what he’d been mumbling this whole time. “It’s in us and it wants us. It’s in us and it wants us. It’s in us and it wants us…” - There isn’t much left of Dad these days. I got to visit a couple times. Fat lot of good it did. As far as I’m concerned, he died that day in the kitchen when he first tried shooting himself. They’re treating us in this special hospital. Mom was real upset that visitations are limited but… I think it might be for the best. Her and my sister tested clean. Most people did. I didn’t. Mom snuck me this phone a couple weeks ago and I been using that to write. Funny thing is one of the orderlies saw me on it a few days ago and just laughed. I think that maybe the government aren’t too worried about this story getting out. At first I didn’t really get why until I started actually putting all this down into writing. Got to the part where that half-man came out the tunnel and I realised no one’s gonna believe me. Still, I gotta try. Partly cause I wanna protect people. Whatever this disease is, it’s a hell of a lot more than some twisted prions and I think the government knows that. Dad certainly did. Most infected did too. That’s why they killed themselves. They wanted out. The voice that comes with this illness is like… it’s like if your brain is just words in a book and then someone dipped that book in a can full of used motor oil. You just wanna give in. Hand it all over. It wants your body so whatever you do, don’t fight. That’s worse. Give it up. In hindsight, we should’ve let Dad kill himself. What he went through was… well it was probably a lot worse than the others who got to die. I sometimes think about going into his room with a pillow, but security is pretty tight around him. As for me, infection is still in its early phase. It takes everyone differently, and for me it’s taking quite its time. They think it’s because of my age. Still, I can sorta feel it under there. Growing. I think it’s why I’m writing this. It wants me to. This sickness, it lives out in the woods. Way way out, in parts of the soil where the sun hasn’t shone in millions of years. It’s old enough to remember a time you could walk from Appalachia to what’s now called Glasgow. And it’s been fumbling around out there, in the brains of deer and other things. The sickness tells me this. Tells me it’s learning about this new world. Tells me how my mind tastes. But most of all… It tells me it’s getting closer. submitted by /u/ChristianWallis to r/nosleep [link] [comments]

TL;DR I went on my (almost) first hiking trip, solo. 3 days, 37 km, 2000 m of elevation gain over Svydovets range in Ukrainian Carpathians. It was great. I prepared myself good enough physically, but it was still every bit as challenging as I wanted it to be. I made some mistakes and took (hopefully) some lessons out of them, but I definitely did a lot of things right too. I’m going backpacking again soon. … So, I went on my first trip, solo. Well, almost first: I was on one 4 day trip 8 years ago with all 20+ kilo of equipment borrowed, and a large group, who I had to be catching up to constantly. It was somewhat fun, but well beyond my physical abilities, plus I caught a bug from the water and spent a couple of day after on a toilet. After discovering Kraig Adams’ solo hiking videos a couple of years after, I started dreaming of hiking too. I’ve been dreaming for years, but something always got in the way: pandemic, family problems, the war et cetera et cetera. This spring, after watching the story of a guy unicycling the world on YouTube, I had a carpe diem moment. I have finally decided to hike. I started preparing myself: got on a calorie deficit (lost 8 kg since March and went from obese to just overweight, hooray!), started training routine of walking exercises, rucking with a loaded pack, climbing stairs every chance I get. I spent an ungodly amount on the equipment. I went for an overnight hike in the vicinity of Kyiv. Didn’t get any sleep on that one due to a missile attack going on and shit being intercepted by air defence and exploding overhead the whole night. But at least I was quite comfortable in my tent, on my pad and under my unzipped bag, as it was quite warm. At some point, with some help from an experienced friend, I’ve built a route: Svydovets mountain range in the Ukrainian Carpathians, 37 km route with a little over 2000 m of elevation gain over 3 days, with the highest peak of 1883 m. … Day 1 On June 2 I got off the train in Kvasy village down in a valley. I was immediately met by border guards, who checked my papers and asked where I’m going. It’s not very close to the border from here, but that’s martial law during wartime for you. I started hiking up right away, as the trailhead starts right at the railway station. Paradoxically, the hardest stretch on that day were the first 200 m of elevation. After that, something clicked, I found a comfortable pace and kept on steadily going up the muddy trail through forests and meadows, past both the already occupied shepherds huts lower down, and still empty ones higher up. About mid-day, I reached a tight group of mountain huts on a meadow at about 1350 masl. They are called kolyba in Ukrainian and are used as shepherds houses throughout the warmer months, but this year the winter here really overstayed, so they were still empty at the start of June. I took an opportunity to refresh myself with a spring water there, cooked (well, boiled the water for my dehydrated meals, and fixed a sandwich, lol) and ate some lunch. I wandered off the main trail once, but seeing on the map as the side path would merge with the trail further, I went on. There was a sheep herd along with its shepherd. He asked me where I’m going and waved his hand along the path, saying I’m doing alright. I stood there confused for a moment, as the path in the direction he pointed to, was occupied completely by the sheep. The shepherd said to just keep going. I did, and the sheep dispersed in front of me like the Red Sea in front of Moses. After some scrambling on a narrow and slippery side path, it finally re-joined the main trail at the exact place where my planned camping site for the night was supposed to be. It fell through though, as the spring there dried up, but I had a backup one more km further along the way. By about 5 o’clock, I reached the backup campsite. During my 10 km (1040 m gain) first day, I have only met half dozen horses, 2 shepherds and some sheep. The camping area was very calm and shielded from wind by pines, with some springs coming out of the side of the hill. I walked around, but struggled to find a level enough spot for the tent, while insects were desperately trying to get in my eyes and mouth. After wandering in and around the campsite for a bit, I finally picked what seemed the flattest spot, but having an obvious incline, it was still far from ideal. I unpacked and set up the tent, pumped up my sleeping pad and got the sleeping bag out of the compression sack to regain some loft. I was surprisingly energetic after my first day, so much more than I anticipated, and I had a lot of time in the day still. So before making dinner, I decided to hike up the ridge above the campsite, and climb the hill that I had just traversed on my way. I enjoyed the views, took some photos and was on my way back to my camp when I decided to take a turn to explore an old overgrown side path traversing the next mountain. There I came across a perfectly level stretch of grass right next to a couple of springs gushing out of the rocks. Because of the light breeze on the side of a mountain, there were much less insects hovering in the air too. This place overlooked the camping area I’ve set in, so while down at my tent, I considered what I should do. I decided to move. I went back to my tent, thrown all smaller things into my backpack randomly. I took the rain fly off the tent and stuffed it into the pack too. I zipped up the inner tent, leaving the inflated sleeping pad and the bag inside. I got the backpack on and grabbed the tent by the poles and tried to walk holding it in my hands. I only made 50 m. It would have been possible if not for the pad and the bag inside, but it was too heavy as it was, so I was afraid to break the tent poles. I had to put the tent down, and fold and pack the poles too, after all. I grabbed the inner tent with the pad and bag under my arm and walked this way a couple hundred meters to the newly found campsite. When I finally made camp on the side of the mountain, I finally drank a can of beer that I’ve been carrying this whole day, and cooked and ate my dinner. Then I went to sleep. I was kinda indecisive about unzipping my sleeping bag into a blanket, thinking it might get colder later in the night, so I would need to fiddle with zippers in the light of a headlamp to zip it all up again, but I just ended up hot and not sleeping very good. Oh well… Day 2 I woke up early. The day started with some deer showing up during my breakfast and walking past me no more than 50 m away. They certainly noticed me, stopped to take a look (and a sniff), but didn’t care. As I was finishing packing my camp, a dog appeared, not a very friendly one. Then, a herd of sheep. And only then - one of the shepherds from yesterday along with a couple more dogs. We had a chat, wished each other a good day and headed our separate ways, with sheep ravaging what just 10 min ago was my campsite. I after a little of elevation gain, I had a good long almost level walk along the ridge until the point where it merges into the main, higher part of the Svydovets range. As I was slowly climbing a steep slope, the weather kept getting harsher. The wind was stiffening, and clouds were getting closer. After steep 400 m, I’ve finally reached the main ridge, finding myself almost in the clouds. By this point, the wind became brutal, and the clouds were worrying as I didn’t want to be caught up in a thunderstorm up top. I kept stopping to put more clothes on, as I have started in shorts and a shirt, but now with no more elevation gain, colder temperatures higher up and with the wind, I kept getting cold. As I went along the ridge, one by one I reached 2 highest summits on my route of a little under 1900 m: mountains Blyznytsia (a Twin from Ukrainian) and Blyznytsia Velyka (a Big Twin). The gusts were becoming stronger still, now draining my energy and making my wrists hurt as they were trying to blow away my hiking poles. I finally met a hiking group, who were mostly kids with some adults and a guide, day hiking from a nearby ski resort, where I was heading. By noon, my route was still following the ridge, but now was mostly downhill. I was walking along some ski lifts, now sitting like bare skeletons on the grassy slope. By early afternoon I finally reached the ski resort cafe in the saddle of the ridge. I’ve had some hot Borshcht, deruny (a fried potato dish kinda similar to hashbrowns) and drank some coffee; used a bathroom (a real toilet and running water are truly a pinnacle of modern civilization!). I bummed a smoke (guilty, I know. I quit last year, but can a fella have a comfort smoke once in a while?) from some guys who turned out to be going the same direction as I was. Spending about 2 hours total in the cafe, I anticipated the rest of my day. It was afternoon already, and I still had half my trek to the campsite to go, although without much elevation gain. The weather forecast showed some rain, but you couldn’t really tell what’s coming, as clouds just kept coming and going across the ridge. The route after the cafe started with a saddle and the mountain Stih. It wasn’t tall, only about 150 m or so above the saddle, but steep. My gut was telling me to traverse it along a dirt road, saving some time and energy, but I stubbornly shut it up and decided to stick to the plan and climb up. A mistake, as it later became clear. I went out of the cafe and walked along the saddle. As I was traversing it, the wind reached its peak for my trip. I could barely walk as it was blowing into my side. I was placing both my trekking poles diagonally to my right, feeling that if I stumble, the wind would just throw me onto the ground. Sometimes, the gusts were getting so strong, that I couldn’t move at all. I was started to think how I will have to just try to lay down head to the wind, probably leave my backpack and crawl back to the cafe if it gets any stronger, or else it might just blow be off the ridge. I managed to cross the saddle and started going up the Stih. The wind was still strong, but at least the gusts weren’t so strong anymore. As I was going up, the first rainstorm flew in, quickly turning into a hail. My left pant quickly got wet, and water was pouring down the pant right into my boot. I reached the top and started descending on the other side right away, without even taking a selfie as the rain kept pouring and I was anxious to be at the top in such weather, especially with a lightning rod on the peak. I descended into the next saddle on the ridge. As I kept going, the rain finally stopped, so I stopped too and took my boot off to pour the puddle out of it and to wring my socks off a bit. The whole going up and down the Stih and trying to minimize the wetness in my shoes took maybe 30-45 min of my time, and I was starting to get tired. But I had to keep pushing, as it was getting late. After a couple more kilometers I met the guys who I met in the cafe earlier. They headed out before I did, managed to go where they planned to, got caught in the rain too, and now were on the way back to the cafe. One of the guys was quite funny looking. He was military, I assume on his time off. He was wearing his uniform camo pants, boots and cap. And a bright pink North Face shell jacket xD. After having a chat, we went our separate ways. I finally reached a point on the route, where I finally had to get off the ridge down to a mountain lake some 400 meters below. The thing is, the marked trail leading there was supposed to be borderline technical even when well maintained in the past. Now, early in the season after the winter overstayed its welcome this year (it still snowed 2 weeks earlier, in the middle of May), it might have been plainly dangerous for someone as inexperienced as I. I had planned a fallback trail down for that occasion, and it was exactly how it went. The marked trail looked scary, and as I was looking at my backup trail curling downhill on a spur in the distance, it seemed like a good idea to head there instead. I had one problem. To get to the spur that the backup route was going down off, I had to summit and cross the top of a minor mountain on the main ridge, but the weather was not looking promising once again. As I closing on the said mountain, it started pouring cats and dogs again, but this time I heard the thunderstorm too. I couldn’t risk going atop of the ridge in the thunderstorm. I had to just keep walking past, looking for some pit in the terrain to wait out the storm safely. I found one along the path and squatted there under the hale hitting me with the gusts of wind, hurting even through my rain jacket. Some quarter (or maybe half) hour later, it finally stopped pouring, but the clouds were still hiding the top of the mountain I needed to hop over, and thunder kept rolling in the distance. As I was walking around anxiously, it was getting uncomfortably late. I had maybe 2 or 2 1/2 hours till the sunset, but I still had to go over 400 m down by what I now expected to be muddy and slippery slope after all the rain. I couldn’t even get to the top of said slope yet because of the storm. I kinda started panicking and questioning my life choices. Then I tried to explore the map on my phone for alternative camping sites, also considering going back to the ski resort that I passed earlier in the day. I would get there by nightfall if I started walking back now, but at least I knew that the path is easy and safe that way, so I would be ok walking it with a headlamp. The clouds were breaking up and sometimes there were some patches of clear blue skies. But despite of there being sunny in the direction the clouds were rolling from, the ridge was making its own weather. As the air mass stumbled at the ridge, it had to quickly climb several hundred meters up, where the moisture was rapidly condensing and clouds were appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Still, the top of the mountain cleared up, so I went for it. As I was going up, I heard thunder again, turned around and quickly hopped down the hill back to safety. Once again, I was waiting for it to clear up. Finally, it did. As I finally started seeing clear skies right above me, I had no time to waste. I quickly hiked over the mountain and started going down along the spur on the other side. The path was steep and slippery, with some stretches eroded by rains, but I was still very happy to be making progress again, as I was seeing the turquoise water of lake Vorozheska 400 m down below. Some tiny tents could be seen near it, as well as some people, who looked like ants from such height. With the help of my trusty hiking poles, I made my way down with about an hour to spare before sundown. I walked around choosing a place, and started setting my tent up. The people, who looked like ants from up above, now came over from their camp to say hi. Seeing how exhausted I am, as I struggled to pitch my tent’s footprint in the wind, they helped me a little and invited me to join them for dinner. I gladly took up at the invitation. After the tent was set up and I unpacked, I grabbed my food and stove and headed over to their camp, now wrapped in my puffy and wearing slippers after spending a whole afternoon in wet shoes. My neighbours turned out to be lovely. They were a group of 7, who knew each other forever. Some of the older people there met in the 80s during mountaineering adventures in the mountains of central Asia, while the countries there were part of the USSR. Others joined later. As they treated me with soup and brandy, sitting by the fire I heard what felt like countless stories of the times gone by. One by one, most of the group left for the night, so I too wished goodnight to those who stayed. I walked to my camp, crawled into the tent and prepared to go to sleep. This time, I knew that nights are warm, so I tried to unzip my sleeping bag into a blanked mode. But the damn zipper was stuck, and I was too exhausted to try to fix it in the torch light. I got into the bag and tried to sleep. It was hot again. As I was falling asleep, I felt like was coming down with a fever. I was shivering and sweating like I had a flu. Thankfully, I wasn’t. I was just flustered with the day I went through, probably dehydrated and low on blood sugar despite having dinner. Day 3 I slept in. As the sun shined over the ridge and onto my tent, I woke up and got out to some beautiful weather. Everything was a little damp, but was quickly drying up in the sun and a light breeze. The sky was clear with some lone clouds here and there. I stretched my legs walking around the camp and had my breakfast on an improvised bench overlooking the lake. I saw that my neighbours were up too, so after breakfast I headed to their camp to say hi and had some coffee with them. I returned to my tent and finished packing. With a pack behind my back, I popped in one more time to thank everyone for hospitality, said my goodbyes and started my final descent to the finish. I had 13 km and nearly 1000 m down to go, and I wanted to catch a beer in a pub before boarding my train back. Up high, it was stellar. I was going downhill through flowery meadows among the pine trees, with nearly a dozen streams flowing across the path for every kilometer. But as I was descending, the forest was becoming thicker and vistas rarer. I was getting more and more tired, but I had to keep moving to make it in time for my beer. After wearing the damp shoes for the second day, for the first during the trip I had to stop to handle some hot points on my feet, so that they wouldn’t become blisters. As I followed the path through the forests, I was finding myself more and more not just tired, but physically exhausted from the continuous effort during these days. Nothing really hurt in my body, I wasn’t sore much, but I barely dragged my feet. I could barely think and felt like I risked stumbling and falling down the slope. I still had some sugary snacks, but eating them didn’t achieve anything, unlike the previous days. I figured I must be dehydrated. I was drinking a lot as I had easy access to water in my drinking bladder for the whole trip, but I may have became low on micro elements as I was sweating this whole time. About 2/3 of my way down, as I was reassured I’m gonna make it in time, I allowed myself to stop for a break before I fall, and have quick lunch. This time I didn’t cook a meal, but got out every salty snack that I had left in my pack, and chewed through them. With salt and half an hour rest, I felt much better, so I went on down. I had the trail end village in sight already. I stopped for a bit, turned on my phone and started dialing numbers of all the taxi drivers one by one. No Uber in these parts, so I googled all the taxi drivers in the area before heading out and saved them on my phone. The second phone number was a success, so I made arrangements with Mykola to pick me up down in the village an hour later. Around this time I was also reminded that I shouldn’t had neglected sun protection, as the skin on my calves was burning every time the sun shined on it. Anyway, I went on along the more and more eroded trail down to the village. In 40 minutes I was finally there, passing a horse who was chewing on its grass, passing a bridge over rambling Chorna Tysa river. I made it to the finish. Mykola came to pick me up and drove me the whole 40 km back to a village back at trailhead where started from 3 days earlier. As we were driving along the road through a narrow valley, I looked at the speedometer, which showed 90 km/h, and I put my hand out of the open window. “Yeah”, - I thought - “that feels about right”. I figured the wind up on the ridge was about the same speed as we were now going in a car. Mykola dropped me off near the Tsypa brewery, where I had 2 cold and refreshing pints of lager. I was in heaven. A couple of hours later I boarded my overnight sleeper train back to Kyiv and was home the next day before noon. … As I’ve been reflecting on my trip, I realised I made a couple of major mistakes that made my way much harder than it could’ve been. Mistake 1: I kept stopping during the first part of the day. First to catch some cell service to post stories on Instagram and sending out pics to friends. I’m not very active on social media, but the emotions from the hike and the natural beauty around me were so overwhelming that I couldn’t stop myself from trying to share them. Then I was stopping several times while climbing up the ridge and on the ridge, as the weather kept getting harsher and I was getting cold. I should have understood better what clothes I needed to wear to stay comfortable, and not to keep stopping to put some more. This stopping and getting started again unnecessarily drained my energy comparing to if I just kept hiking in steady pace. Mistake 2: That damn Stih! While I was still in the cafe in the middle of my second day, my gut was telling me to traverse it. But no. I ignored it and let my stubbornness take over. I went up despite already being tired, and lost 30-45 minutes getting up and down, and handling puddles in my shoes after the shower I got into there. Consequently, 30 minutes (or even less!) would have been all that I needed to pass that mountain later on to make it to the spur before the rain with a thunderstorm rolled in. If I hadn’t climbed the damn Stih, I would have probably been chilling near the fire with that awesome group of people full 2 hours earlier than I did, and wouldn’t be nearly as exhausted at the end of the day. I might would have even figured out the zipper on my sleeping bag if I made camp earlier, so my night would be much more pleasant. What lessons do I take out of all these experiences I’ve had along the trail? Trust your gut. I felt I would benefit from a shortcut, but didn’t take it and ended up more exhausted, missed Stop less. Every stop drops down your heart rate, making it harder to keep going while it’s getting pumping again Try to anticipate what you’ll need to be wearing in advance. I knew to start cold to be comfortable going up later. Now I also know when it might me time to put some more wind protection than I need right now, as I know I’ll be needing it half an hour later Look where you’re stepping at, especially on the descent. I’m a city kid, so I’m used to level sidewalks and smooth park paths. I’ve never lived anywhere near the mountains, so I don’t have it as a habit to look under my feet. So as I was going, I constantly found myself getting distracted by the view or even by my own thoughts, and failing to pay attention to the trail as the result. I nearly tripped and fallen probably half a dozen times during the hike. A couple of times during my descent to the lake on the second day, I caught myself distracted on a narrow and slippery trail with near vertical cliffs on either sides. I was properly terrified as I realised that being distracted there could as well cost me my life. I promised myself to make an active effort to stay focused on the trail during descents and dangerous parts such as this Take your time picking a camping spot Don’t waste your time trying to share what you’re experiencing on social media in real time. It’s useless. It’s what you’re getting away from in the first place. Just be present, be aware of your surroundings, just be. By the end of the trip this mindset was already full on. I didn’t really want to get on Instagram or anywhere else by the time I finished. I was happy inside my own head A couple of minor gear issues to figure out (like the water coming down my pants into the shoes during the rainstorm, a stuck zipper on my sleeping bag, packing), but overall I was quite happy with what I had equipment wise I do also have to say kudos to me, actually! There are things that I had done right: I trained well. I love walking, but I’ve been extremely out of shape since forever. This thing has finally given me the push to get better. I’ve lost and I’m continuing to lose weight. I’m eating healthy. I exercise every day, even after the trip. I will probably join the gym right after the next trip. I also plan to start running once I’m not so overweight, but I don’t want to hurt my knees starting running too early I somewhat learned how to hike beforehand. I watched a lot of hiking videos and read a lot here on reddit, but the single most valuable thing I learned as I was preparing for the trip, was how to walk properly (huuuge shout out to The Map Reading Company channel and the “Walk up hills without getting tired” video on the topic!). Might sound silly for you hiking lot, but for me it was crucial to become conscious of how I’m moving and applying my limited energy. I didn’t expect to crush the 900 m elevation gain on my first day so easily I went alone. Sounds debatable, but I’m glad I did. I love people and socializing, don’t get me wrong, but I like being alone too. I took this as a chance to be present off the grid, to take on a challenge on my own, and to reflect on my life in general. Being able to go at my own (slow) pace was what allowed the trip not to be exhausting until much later. I have some friends who I’ll be happy to hike with if they decide to tag along, but I’m just as happy to be hiking by myself. In spite of a few shortcomings, I’ve chosen the equipment well. The pack (Osprey Atmos LT 50) was holding weight like it wasn’t there for the whole trip, the tent (Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL2 Long) is light and roomy (I’m a tall boy at 194 cm), the rain jacket (Outdoor Research Foray II) kept me dry but not toasty, the boots (Scarpa Rush 2 Mid GTX) were light and didn’t give me any blisters, the trekking poles (MSR Dynalock Ascent Carbon) made the hike so much easier that I wouldn’t want to go without them. A Garmin watch, that I’ve gotten right before the trip, helped with stress free navigation a lot by just giving me a piece of mind with a glance on my wrist, and informing me if I strayed off route. I didn’t overpack much. I did end up with a bit of food left, but otherwise I’ve worn and used almost every thing I took, especially the heavier ones. My base weight is about 11 kilo. Not ultralight, but pretty decent I planned the route well. My experienced friend has only pointed me to this mountain range as a great place to start, but I did all the research and planned the route on my own. I did ask him to take a look at the final route just in case I made some mistake planning, but it only got his approval I made it, after all, and I liked it! As I’m writing this, I already have the next trip in mind. The highest range in Ukraine - Chornohora. Petros mountain (4th tallest in Ukraine, 2020 m), Nesamovyte lake, Shpytsi rock formation. About the same distance, but a lot more elevation gain on the first day, and chill walk on the next two. It also will be interesting to try and recall my experience from 8 years ago as a part of the route on the second day will overlap with the route back then. I feel I will be doing this a lot. submitted by /u/goroskob to r/hiking [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/AndreaNewsHub to r/ItaliaBox [link] [comments]

TLDR: looking for recommendations for cots/sleeping pads, sleeping bags, sleeping pillows, and general advice on sleeping arrangements for two adults, a 7 year old, and an almost 2-year-old. We don't have a huge budget but are willing to invest over time. Bonus points for links directly to the products you recommend Hello! We are adjusting to camping with two kids and looking for some recommendations on sleeping arrangements. A little background info: we have two adults, a 7-year-old and an almost 2-year-old. Previously, we used a humongous queen-sized air mattress for the adults. We used to go camping about 3-4 times a year but took a year off when I got pregnant. Last year, we only went once when the baby was using a pack-n-play. we have a huge tent (maybe 10-12 people), so I'm not worried about space being an issue. We're looking to update our sleeping arrangements. We're sick and tired of that air mattress. It takes up way too much space, and it's not even that comfortable. We have also been taking our regular pillows and blankets with us and were also getting tired of lugging those around. When it's cold, we have to bring the thicker/bulkier ones. Then, when we get home, everything has to be washed, and it takes forever. I want to leave behind my regular bedding and come home to a nice, clean, fully made bed. So far, we have a kid's cot for the youngest. He normally sleeps in a crib, so his being free range will be... interesting. I think we are looking into cots for the rest of us. We have two adult inflatable sleeping pads. I really like them, but my husband doesn't. I think the plan is to use the pads on the cots. The 7-year-old will need a cot and a sleeping pad. Bedding/sleeping bag recommendations? I don't really want to drop a ton of money on them right now, but theoretically, we could. We live in Texas, so it is usually humid at night. During the spring and fall, we have some really nice weather days, but it can get pretty chilly at night. Originally, I was thinking of sleeping bags that have multiple layers so we could remove the heavy layer if it's warm at night. After some quick searching, I am wondering if it might be cheaper to buy a warm liner/insert separate from the sleeping bags. Lastly, pillows. I am so sick of lugging around our regular bed pillows. I hate camping with them. What are the recommendations that you all recommend? I'm seeing $20 for one camping pillow. I am tempted to go to Walmart and get the cheapest regular pillows that they have so I won't cry if we decide to throw them away submitted by /u/evergreatest7479 to r/camping [link] [comments]

It looks like the Deuter website is no longer selling the bag. Maybe they have an updated version, but this bag is amazing. Love it: Dueter Kid comfort Art.No. 3620221-5026 We try to get our 21 month old outside daily, or at least a few times a week especially in the winter, we love the snow. The weather was turning closer to -25⁰C which is -14⁰F and that's freaking cold for a baby who's just sitting still, legs dangling. I love hiking and snowshoeing with my kid in the pack, but I wanted some confidence that he will actually be warm. So I found an adult XL sleeping bag that fit around him and the bag. I used packing tape as my feather management, taping where I wanted to cut, sewing it first on either side of my cut line, and adding more tape as I cut it apart. It was a lot of tape but it was worth it. Feathers was kept to a minimum. Didn't even need to vacuum. I used tape and paper to make a template of the shape of the kid carrier and then transferred it to the sleeping bag. I sewed all the way around, both sides of the cut line, 4 lines total in most places (i found it pinched the feathers more), then cut the hole. I added more tape as I cut to pluck the lose feathers, removing the tape as I fed it through the bias maker feed tool (whatever it's called). Trimmed all the cut edges with 1" black polyester bias binding tape purchased from Sailrite. That was the easy part. I added some velcro strips to close the bag under the backpack strapping, although if i did this again (I might), I would make a separate rectangular oanel that connects the sides, under the straps, instead of two little strips of velcro. It is difficult to get my hands in behind it and pull it tight. If the oanel was flat I could yank it through and have the connection on one side of the bag instead of in the middle, under the back supports. I added some clips to secure it at the bottom and top to keep it tight around the carrier and as closed of a system as I could make it. The neck didn't have the ability to cinch originally, but I added an elastic pull string to keep the heat in. The bag came with a nice hood that fit perfectly over the Dueter sun shade and it was perfect for keeping him protected from harsh winds as well. The bottom of the sleeping bag i cut shorter and sewed some webbing that çinches closed. I like having quiet access through the bottom so I can check how cold his feet are with out letting much warm air out, even if he's sleeping. Overall this project was technically easy to me, very fun, took less than 6 hours to modify, and now it seems essential for any winter loving new parent. submitted by /u/Okinanna to r/myog [link] [comments]

I'm an adult scouter (Scouts of America volunteer), and recently got into backpacking and loved it so much so that I decided to be a Merit Badge Counselor for Backpacking, which means that I'll be teaching Scouts how to backpack. That being said, since my Troop is based out of Houston, the heat is inevitable and I know from my experience car camping in Houston temps won't get that cold. How do you guys lock in your sleep systems for the heat? A 20 degree rated sleeping bag is definitely overkill, but what do people do instead? EDIT: for clarity, asking about the full system itself. Go for lower R-value pads? Keep rainfly off if weather permits for better airflow? Use just a sleeping bag liner instead of a full bag? What are some tips/tricks specifically for temps above 60f? submitted by /u/chopsticksss11 to r/backpacking [link] [comments]

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/Other_Salt3889 My wife is addicted to the gym and it’s ruining our marriage Originally posted to r/TrueOffMyChest & r/survivinginfidelity BoRU 1 BoRU 2 BoRU 3 BoRU 4 BoRU 5 Editor's Note: Due to the updates being large, detailed tldr's have been made to the first 7 posts to give a summary of them. If you would like the full posts, please see the previous BoRU Thank you to the amazing u/JebWynch for the tldr's Thanks to u/Small-Bodybuilder160 for letting me know this updated TRIGGER WARNING: infidelity, physical violence, anger management issues Original Post Feb 1, 2024 OP’s Wife (30f) has always been fit but has been increasingly passionate about working out over the last 1.5 years, returning to a gym she had previously left due to her busy schedule. the gym slowly started taking over her schedule- both weekend days, and every weekday pre- and post-work. going to the gym becomes the solution for any stress, fights, crisis- everything is Gym to the point where if Wife misses a “session” it affects her mood negatively, as OP says, “like a junkie not getting her fix”. As Wife is now 4mo pregnant, OP expresses concern over the intensity of her workouts and also that he simply misses her, given all her time is now taken up by Gym. they can’t workout together, because Gym is “her time”. She won’t work out at his gym, either. Gym becomes a form of escapism from real life, a compulsion, essentially- and no problems Wife is running away from ever really get solved because Gym is simply not the solution Wife seems to think it is. Gym has become so prevalent that family members, friends start making comments on how much time Wife and Gym spend together. Update Feb 11, 2024 OP shares that he had originally laughed over comments on his post that speculated about infidelity, but quickly came to discover they were correct. Wife has been sleeping with Guy From Gym, who she had mentioned to OP countless times as a “gym friend”. There is confrontation- OP breaks Wife’s phone, Wife hits OP. OP leaves for a short period of time and returns to Wife, who, though remorseful, will not admit to exactly what infidelities she’s committed. Update 1 ends with OP feeling guilt for his rage, left with 0 answers as to exactly what’s going on with Wife. Update 2 - My wife admitted to an affair Feb 12, 2024 aaaaaaaand Wife admits to an affair. She “felt bad” about it, but not bad enough to not sleep with Guy From Gym pretty quickly. She might even be in love with him, she doesn’t know (or won’t say). And oh, there’s a chance the child she’s currently pregnant with might not be OP’s. She’ll get a paternity test though! Stellar work, Wife. My wife is moving in with her AP, they’re “in love” Feb 22, 2024 Guy From Gym and Wife (who will still be referred to as Wife….. for now……) are moving in together. She’s not getting the paternity test. OP expresses sadness for her- that she just cant be alone, or seem to work through her mess on her own. Wife had been with OP since she was 20, and OP theorizes she is codependent. Guy From Gym allegedly doesn’t care if the baby isn’t his, he’s happy to play house with OP’s Wife. My wife has agreed to a paternity test Feb 29, 2024 Shocker, Guy From Gym wants a paternity test so a paternity test they will get! In follow up comments, OP reveals the results say he is in fact the father. And update on my wife’s affair and pregnancy March 15, 2024 OP is now conflicted. He has gone from excited to be a father, to not being sure he’s going to be a father at all, to now knowing he will be the father of a child born into the disaster that Wife has created. There is a small but non physical confrontation between OP and Guy From Gym when Wife brings him to OP’s house to gather things she needs, and OP tells Guy From Gym to leave or he’s gonna punch him. OP and Wife have private words upstairs, Wife is just sooooo in love with Guy From Gym, she can’t help it! Predictably, confrontation becomes physical when OP returns to his living room to see Guy From Gym still standing there despite the warning, and so OP follows through and cold clocks him. Update 5 closes with OP and Wife still legally married, but Wife dedicated to living with and loving Guy From Gym. Another installment of the implosion which is my marriage Apr 10, 2024 OP’s Wife(?) is still pergananté, 26 weeks. OP and Wife have agreed that he will be the one in the delivery room when the baby is born, and Guy From Gym will not be present. Guy from Gym has a big problem with this, of course, because having an affair with and housing another man’s pregnant wife simply would not be enough. OP prepares to sell the marital house and split the profit. He gets to keep their dog, thank god. Wife’s sister shares with OP that Wife is already complaining about Guy From Gym, that he’s selfish, hangs out away from home too much, etc……birds of a feather and whatnot. OP ends the update expressing that he is at least happy his (Soon-To-Be-Ex) Wife is miserable. I’m still alive May 19, 2024 I’m still alive. I’m mainly posting here because several people have reached out to me and were concerned that I’d taken my own life. No, I’m not on the brink of ending my life. I think I’m doing better than I have since all of this started. Around the time of my last post, my story blew up and I was getting messages from people who saw it on TikTok and YouTube. I had to take a step back because it was a little overwhelming. I have over 100 unread messages here. I appreciate it but it was a little uncomfortable at the time, and I got to the point where I didn’t really want to talk about the situation with my wife and her AP anymore. So as of today, our baby is due in less than 10 weeks. We’re in the home stretch now. I don’t feel prepared at all. All of this other stuff has just been so distracting. I started working on a nursery. It’s not done yet, but I have the floor finished and the walls painted. My ex-wife was impressed with the color scheme and furniture I chose. She’s not legally my ex-wife yet but I’ve started calling her that. It sort of makes it easier. I also packed up a bunch of her stuff. Originally I refused to spend my time packing up her things, but eventually just said screw it and started packing it. I’m at the point where it’ll just be easier to not see all of her stuff around here. Why did I leave it for so long? She came over to get some of the boxes I packed up. She came alone. Things were fine between us. I loaded the stuff into her car. We didn’t argue. At one point she started to tear up and said she fucked up. I said yeah she did, but there’s no point talking about it now. She shit all over our marriage. She has her muscle bound asshole to go home to now anyway so who cares. She said “I know, but it’s not the same.” I told her nothing has been the same since she decided to fuck him the first time. Supposedly he’s going to “let” me be in the delivery room when my baby is born. I didn’t even argue it when she said it like that, but inside I was boiling at the idea of him letting me be there for the birth of my child. She says she talked to him and he agreed it wouldn’t really be right to not allow me to be there. I’m going to take what I can get if it means being there for the birth of my child. I’m going to try to just ignore him for the time being. She was acting all sweet and laying on all of the “I really want you there. I really need you there” stuff and I know mentally I’m not in a place to be that cold to her when she starts acting that way. I’m trying to be indifferent more than anything else but it’s so hard when she’s actually around and starts looking at me a certain way and making me feel bad. She invited me over to see the nursery they have set up at his house. I’m not sure I can bring myself to go into another man’s house and look at the nursery set up for my kid. I did ask her if she was truly safe there though. I don’t know why, it’s just been bothering me. As pissed as I still am, I don’t want to find out he’s mistreating her and I definitely don’t want my kid to be going into an unsafe household. I haven’t told her about anything her sister has told me. They probably won’t last but as of right now there’s a very good chance my newborn baby will be going home to his house. It kills me to think about. It’s almost soul destroying to think about if I dwell on it too long. She says she’s fine. He genuinely loves her. He’s great with kids. He accepts that she’s having a baby and that this is part of the package. She insists it’s not weird because she wasn’t pregnant when anything started between them. I asked her why she did it…why did she ever let anything start between them in the first place. She said “I don’t know.” Then went into “I don’t want to talk about this” mode and left pretty soon after. Typical behavior from her - just run away. Overall I’m doing ok. I’m not sitting here depressed and drinking a bottle of scotch every night anymore. I mean on occasion, but for the most part no. I feel more used to my new normal now, and that’ll all change yet again pretty soon. ADDITIONAL INFO There is a draft of a custody plan now, but the court won’t approve anything until after the baby is born. Right now she’s in agreement but there’s plenty of time for her to change her mind (or for him to convince her to change her mind). She plans to breastfeed, but with agreement that she’ll pump and the baby can drink from a bottle when not with mom. Everything I’ve read says a baby ideally needs to spend time with each parent frequently, without gaps that are too long in between, and it’s best if each parent is feeding, changing, bathing, etc. during their time. At this time she’s in agreement with all of this. I can say that she’s not said or done anything to indicate she wants to restrict my time with the baby, other than the whole delivery room thing. She seems to want me to be involved in that respect. I hope she sticks to her word. If not, I will be fighting it through legal means. I’m a dad July 2, 2024 I have a baby. A little girl. I’m a dad. She was born yesterday at 11:57 pm, 2 weeks early. As he’s done before, she was having some pains off and on and he left for work yesterday morning. She works from home on Mondays. She told me around 8:30 am she was having contractions 17 minutes apart. The same thing happened not long ago but then by evening all the pains stopped. I was at work so I told her to keep me posted. A little later she said they were 15 minutes apart and she had some other signs it might be actual labor starting. I asked her if she needed somebody there with her. She said wanted me to come be with her. I didn’t even mean to volunteer myself. She was scared. I didn’t even ask why she didn’t call him. I left work and went over to his house. Uncomfortable doesn’t begin to describe it but there were obviously more important things going on. He wasn’t there. She didn’t even contact him. She said she just wanted it to be me and her there. In her words, he hadn’t seen her pee or shit herself yet but I’ve witnessed all of that stuff already so she was more comfortable with me there. I really tried to be as nice and supportive as possible. Set the whole thing about her affair, our marriage, everything to the side for a brief time. I don’t really know what my purpose was being there but I think she just needed somebody there so she didn’t feel alone. She spent most of the time stretching and doing some sort of yoga labor routine and bouncing on this huge exercise ball. I twiddled my thumbs for the most part and looked through a bunch of his belongings. I was timing the contractions and they were consistent and slowly did get closer together, so I thought it was probably actually going to happen. It wasn’t nearly far enough along to go to the hospital yet and it was getting close to when he’d get home. I was planning how I’d handle that when she called me into the bathroom to ask her if I thought her water broke. It wasn’t like in the movies with this huge gush of water. So he got home and I was there. He came into the house and the first thing he asked is “what are you doing here?!” I think he thought something else was going on. No, you just left and went to work and left her alone when she was scared. He said he was home and he’d be with her until it was time to go to the hospital. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something like “thanks, bud…I got it from here and we’ll call you when we’re on the way to the hospital.” He called me bud. I told him I wasn’t his fucking buddy and to fuck off. I could tell she wanted me to leave. I’m not sure she really wanted me to leave so much as she was in labor and the tension between the two of us wasn’t what she needed and I knew that. It was his house so what was I supposed to do? I left and prayed they’d actually call me instead of letting me know the next day that my kid had been born. She texted me a few hours later to say the doctor told her to go to the hospital. At that point I still didn’t know if I was going to be waiting outside or what he’d decide was best for his apparent wife and child. I was allowed to be in the room. I didn’t force my way in there. She said she wanted me to be there. He was there too. By far the single most awkward experience of my life and the only reason I was able to excuse it was because she told me she wanted me there and I didn’t want to miss the chance to be there when my kid was born and to hold my kid before he did. I can’t imagine what the doctors and nurses were thinking. Fucking humiliating. Then the guy tried to police what I could see. I put the baby in there! He’s fucking watching and it’s like this is still my wife and that’s my baby. I chose to stay dignified and I ignored him the entire time. I was there to do whatever she told me to do and my focus wasn’t on him, but in any other setting I don’t think I would have been able to hold back. The baby came flying out. I mean, as far as labor goes. These are the nurses’ words and I trust labor and delivery nurses to know what they’re talking about. She tore very bad because the baby came out so fast. The baby is so tiny, barely 6 pounds and only 18 inches, but perfectly healthy. I went home for a short rest although I really couldn’t rest at all. I went back today and of course he was there. Surprisingly he said he was going to give us some time alone with the baby. Not sure if she had previously asked him to do that when I showed up or not, didn’t ask. He even brought us all food back when he returned a few hours later. I wondered if mine might be poisoned but I tried to be nice. He’s still not gone so I’m wondering how long he’ll be around. I just can’t let myself do anything that will make her try to keep me away from my daughter now. I don’t want them making it difficult for me. I’d prefer not to share her name publicly but I can confirm it’s the name we chose for a daughter years ago. He had no say and he hasn’t said anything about the name at all. It kills me to see him holding her though. I eventually left because it was just too much sitting there pretending to be like some bizarre three’s company. I’ll know I will get my time with her when he’s not around. He’s already posting them on his social media. I don’t know how I’m going to do this but I’m going to figure it out. I just have to find a way to be the bigger person because I won’t let him or their relationship discourage me from being my daughter’s dad. I totally get doing anything for your kids now and if it means having to pretend to get along with him, I will Life update July 24, 2024 Many people have asked for an update on my situation, but I’ve been pretty busy. There’s the baby, plus a week of completely unrelated but neverending annoying problems. Remember that book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Thats the week I’ve been having, but I’m not even going to get into it beyond saying I can’t even stay at my own house right now due to a giant hole in the wall. I’ve been dealing with insurance and contractors all day, and they hit a water pipe. I’m still on paternity leave and continue to regularly spend time with my daughter. We have a set schedule for when my daughter comes to stay with me, so I’ve been spending less time over at his house. Sometimes my wife needs help during the day though, or just to be able to take a shower or a nap, so I will stop over to help her. Really, I just want to take advantage of any opportunity I can to spend time with her my baby and bond with her. Plus, breastfeeding isn’t working out very well. She’s still not producing enough milk and I know she’s upset about it but it sort of makes things easier for me. At least she has help when the baby is with her (supposedly he helps, gets up at night, etc.) I’m on my own, and I won’t lie and say it’s a walk in the park, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. The other day she called me and asked me to come over. She said she was on the verge of a mental breakdown. I’ve heard that line from her many times, when she was cheated on me without my knowledge, and it was usually mostly related to her job. I got over there and she was saying she can’t handle being a mom, she can’t handle life, she can’t function. She was crying. This time she couldn’t run off the the gym. She would if she could but she’s not really allowed to exercise yet. She won’t talk to anyone, won’t seek professional help. Some days she seems much better than others. She’s just an easily overwhelmed person. Everything overwhelms her. Sometimes we have, dare I say, a good time together. The most she can really go as far as physical activity right now is walk. We took the baby in her longest walk yet and walked from his house to my house. Everything was fine in the walk. She was in a good mood. We were joking around. Then she turned really sad after being at my house/our former shared house after a little while. She finally admitted that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, raising our daughter between 2 homes. She said my home is our daughter’s real home and she’s only supposed to have one home. Then she started sobbing about not having a home anymore. My house isn’t her home and her boyfriend gumbro’s house isn’t her home and she’s essentially homeless and doesn’t belong anywhere. She admitted she fucked up really badly and she doesn’t want to share custody or to only see her daughter half the time. She “just wants to come home” but she loves “him” and she thinks he loves her and our daughter and she doesn’t want to hurt him after he’s done “all this” for her. I said so what? What she wants for her kid should be more important than his feelings. If he can’t get over the fact that the married, pregnant woman who he was sleeping with wants her kid to grow up in a single home with her actual father, he can fuck off. He can fuck off anyway. If she can’t tell him and wants me to tell him, I will. She doesn’t think she can tell him. I told her this is her biggest issue - communication and honesty. Just tell people the truth and stop being a pussy about ever telling anyone the truth about how you really feel. Thing is, I’ve been tolerating him lately. Don’t like him, but tolerate him. I’m not hanging out with him. Ever. I know it sounds crazy coming from me, but I think he’s genuinely in this. Still shouldn’t have been fucking my wife. Doesn’t absolve him of any of his involvement. He’s back to being cloyingly nice to me. Suggesting we hang out, try to be friends. He’s so fucking happy all the time. It’s a little unsettling but I think he’s just one of those people and maybe that’s what she likes about him. I’m not one of those people, never will be. So anyway, she and I sort of got into an argument - started as a discussion, turned into an argument, then morphed back to a discussion…all about everything we don’t like about each other and our relationship. In the end, we were both able to say what we need from the other person. Shes just too overwhelmed right now and can’t make any changes. She can’t handle trying to change right now. It gives her too much anxiety. So, I don’t know. We’re sort of at an impasse right now. Then this stuff with the house, I’ve just been extra stressed and not really all that pleasant to deal with. My wife has “moved home” for now July 28, 2024 This month continues to be the strangest I’ve ever experienced. The repairs to my house were made and I’m back home thankfully. I can only take a few night under my parents’ roof. I slept with somebody else. We went out on a date. I think we both just wanted to have sex to say we’d finally gotten over our former spouses. Shes the ex-wife of a friend of mine. She and I are actually closer/better friends now than her ex-husband and I. Several people have suggested that we start dating each other. We get along great and we are on the surface a really good match, but it was too fucking weird for both of us. She’s very attractive, very social and fun to be around, and has been incredibly kind to me during this whole ordeal, but I can’t see her as more than a friend. I had been intentionally avoiding sleeping with anyone else. I hadn’t been with anyone since the last time I slept with my wife. That feels like an eternity ago. For the longest time I wasn’t interested in being with other women. Then, it sort of morphed into my way of feeling morally superior to her. I was going to hold out and not pursue anything until after we were divorced. It’s pretty pointless and childish. Just a dumb way to make myself feel better and to be able to say I never cheated. I still don’t feel like I cheated - there is no marriage anymore. Within hours of this happening, I started getting texts from my wife saying she decided she wants to come home. It’s like she had some sort of with sense. She was saying she was ready, would I come help her. I called her and told her I don’t want her to come home and to be in a relationship again. She doesn’t get to just decide that’s what’s going to happen. She then started to say “oh I know, I just meant move back in.” I told her I didn’t really believe her and felt like she was just jerking me around again. She said she thought our conversation the other day had gone so well and that she thought we seem to be at a place where we could really work on fixing everything, but until then she could live in another room. She said she was completely serious about it and she wants our daughter to be in one home. I feel so mixed about everything, but ultimately I want my daughter living in my house 24/7 and I don’t want another man helping to raise her, so I took the bait. Today I showed up at his house to help her move some things, but I anticipated I’d get there and she’d either have changed her mind or she wouldn’t have been planning to leave at all and was only waiting to see me do some more tricks for her. They were arguing when I got there. The baby was crying, she was crying and running around packing things in bags, and he was following behind her begging her to stay, offering to do anything to make her stay. He accused me of this being my idea. Maybe it was, idk. I don’t really care what he thinks. It was obvious she had just sprung this news on him shortly before I got there. She was telling her over and over that she just wants her child raised in one home and that his home wasn’t really their home and she was sorry she was doing this to him after everything he’d done but she just has to give our daughter one home with her real father. We got back over to my house and she’s obviously an emotional mess. I have no room prepared for her. Not 15 minutes later he shows up at the front door. She didn’t want to talk to him. He wouldn’t give up and eventually he was there on the front porch loudly saying things like “that’s not what you were saying when you were blowing me last night!” So at that point, after I’m sure our neighbors had been enjoying this embarrassing scene long enough, I told him if he didn’t leave I’d call the cops. I went out there and tried to calm him down, I mean, I had to sympathize with him…she runs away, that’s what she does. I may have said a few other things in my own favor and to make him realize he doesn’t want to be involved in this mess that is my wife. I don’t think he’ll give up so easily. It sounds terrible, but once she was at my house I sort of found myself wishing she’d leave with him. I know I’d had wanted her to come home, and I tell myself it was mostly due to the baby, but now I’m wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into. She said “I didn’t really blow him last night. I haven’t done anything with him since she was born. I’ve only been thinking about you.” I told her yeah right, you expect me to believe it? Even if it’s true, what on earth makes you think I’d ever believe anything that you say? Then out of spite I told her I slept with somebody else. I know I only told her to hurt her, and I feel bad about it now. She immediately demanded to know who. I told her it wasn’t her business. She claims it is her business because we’re still married. Nope, I’m not sharing. So, now we’re awkwardly existing. I don’t have much faith that she’s going to stay here. I think she’ll be back at his place within the week. I’ve told her that he’s not allowed over here. He has no business being here. And if we’re raising our daughter in the same house, together, then she can’t just run off to his house to be with him whenever she feels like it - it won’t work that way. She says she knows, and she wants me to want to be with her again and she’ll prove to me she can be a good partner. She tried to kiss me and I rejected her. She’s upset. She’s taking a nap now. I feel like I’ve dug myself into a very deep hole now. Another update from this spineless pussy Aug 5, 2024 I don’t really have an update, but I’m mainly making this post because I’ve received a ton of comments on my previous post and it’s gotten too big to really follow anymore. When I get a notification that somebody has responded to my post or comment, I click on it and it should take me directly to the person’s comment, but it doesn’t. So I have to scroll through all of the comments to find the one I want to respond to. I don’t have time to scroll through 800 comments. I don’t respond to some comments by choice. I get it, many people think I’m a doormat and need to grow a spine. What can I really say? We can trade places and you can tell me how easy it is to navigate this and then we’ll talk. I did plan to divorce her. The papers are ready. I admit that I have stalled in having her served. I can’t put into words why. The lawyer wanted to do it back in July 29 and I told him I needed more time. I’m kind of embarrassed by my hesitation. But this is my life and it’s very easy for completely uninvolved bystanders to advocate for divorce and all sorts of unrealistic things like getting sole custody of my daughter. If I needed to take on sole custody, you bet I would. My wife isn’t crazy. I get that you all have a very bad perception of her. I’ve created that perception. Well, I didn’t create that image - I’ve simply shared the truth about her actions, so she’s created that image. That’s all anyone reading my posts knows about her, nothing good. She does have some good qualities, and believe me, I didn’t want to let myself remember or acknowledge any of them for a long time. She’s don’t horrible things, hurtful things, incredibly selfish things. She is an emotional person. She’s a highly stressed, anxious person who tends to live on by the whims of her emotions. I’m not saying it’s not tiring and frustrating at times or even most of the time, but I’m telling you that she’s not crazy. She’s not an immediate danger to the safety of our baby. She’s not doing anything that’s going to make a court give me full custody. Do I think she’s in the best possible place to raise a whole human being? No. I mean, either am I, but she has a lot of work to do and I know that. We weren’t planning to have a baby when she got pregnant. I would not have purposely conceived a baby at that time because she was sort of already a mess prior to finding out she was pregnant. But there’s a difference between that and being legitimately unstable to the point of not being able to tend to the basic needs of her child. She’s doing that. She actually seems less of a mess and less anxious than she was a year ago this time, when she was having her weekly meltdowns. She also owns our home along with me. Sure, I’ve always paid the mortgage, but the courts don’t really care who’s been paying the mortgage when the house is in both of our names. I can’t just kick her out. We had planned to sell the house and split the proceeds. Honestly, it seemed like the easiest and quickest solution. Houses are selling very fast around here and we’d make a profit. It stings to have to split the profits but it wasn’t a hill I wanted to die on. I think it’s ultimately best for my child to have her mother involved in her life and to develop a bond with her mom, regardless of where her mom ends up living or what the relationship between the two of us is like. I also think the safety and wellbeing of my child’s mother is important for my child. She needs a place to live. I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed some of the moments of normalcy we’ve had. It’s ok if you want to say I’m rugsweeping. I’m just so fucking tired. I’m tired of being angry, tired of being sad, tired of all the drama. So to have a few days days where life feels like it used to when my life was much less complicated, and to just sit around doing mundane things together without necessarily thinking about this big master plan, divorce, reconciliation, custody, etc. feels sort of good. I feel like I can catch my breath for a second. If you want to call me spineless because I’m enjoying finally having those moments that I always dreamed we’d have together with our first child, so be it. There are still moments in feel annoyed. I kind of liked living in my own. I got used to it, or I thought I had. Sometimes it feels like she’s invading my space, but I’m handling it the best that I can. There are still things I love about her. There are some things I now hate about her. I hate things that she did. I guess I love who she used to be, but sometimes she shows glimpses of that person and I miss her. I admit that I really do miss that person I fell in love with. We’ve been together since I was 22, she was 20. Most of our adult lives. We moved in together after only a few months. We’ve experienced most adult things together, good and bad. We lived in a few shit hole apartments together, moved across the country together, bought and sold and then bought a house together, travelled to many places and had great adventures and made some good memories, survived COVID and the horrible DIY haircuts we gave each other, weathered job losses, car accidents, health scares, had some horrible fights, had some great make up sex, dealt with a few pregnancy scares, basically grew up together. Well, she didn’t grow up. She has a very hard time adulting. We used to be like best friends, always together. She still has a hold on me in some ways and what’s the use in trying to deny it? NEW UPDATE I filed for divorce Aug 23, 2024 Thanks to everyone whose reached out to check on me. I’ve had a lot going on, new baby obviously being the most obvious thing, but life has truly been a “when it rains it pours” situation lately. Ultimately, I’m fine. I filed for divorce. She’s been served. It wasn’t because of anything new she did that I haven’t already shared here. I was thinking about it practically every other second for about 2 weeks and ultimately decided I couldn’t live like that anymore, constantly thinking about it and wondering if I should do it. So I pulled the bandaid off and told the lawyer to move forward (the paperwork had already been completed and was just waiting for me to say go). I feel relieved. I think I was feeling more stress just constantly weighing what I should and shouldn’t do. Now that I made a decision, I feel better. The more we’re together here at home the more I realize this isn’t what I want and that I can’t be with her in any sort of romantic, committed way again. I hope that we can be friends and not just co-parents who only communicate about our kid when necessary. I’m actually enjoying being around her now, for the most part. I’m enjoying doing platonic things together. But the thought of anything beyond that isn’t appealing to me. I love her as the person I used to be married to her and I love and respect her as the mother of my children, but I don’t love her in the same way I used to and I don’t think I can ever get over everything she’s done. I don’t want to be in a relationship where I’m filled with resentment and mistrust for the rest of my life. Plus, the longer she was here, the more reminders I got of the other issues in our relationship that I guess I was able to sort of brush aside before her affair came to light. I had to really weigh staying together and trying counseling and therapy, if she’d agree to it which she has never done, to try to have those feelings for her again and keep our family under 1 roof vs. splitting time with my child, seeing her only part of the time, and almost certainly having another man/father figure in my daughter’s life (if not the AP then somebody else). It really dawned on me after she had her 6 week postnatal checkup and she was cleared for sex. She wanted us to have sex. I didn’t want to at all. She was upset, hurt. She still has no idea how deeply she hurt me. Prior to that, her affair partner made another appearance at our house. This time he was calm. He asked her to talk and she told me she had to talk to him, but asked me not to leave the house. So I went in another room and yes I listened to their entire conversation. The gist basically was he wanted her back and he loves her. She told him he’s a great guy but they never should have been together, she needs to be with her family (me and our daughter) and that she was sorry for getting him so involved in this mess. If it wasn’t for me and our daughter she’d be with him, but she has to choose us. She is still living here. We got into a huge argument last night. She threw water all over me. She got in her car and left, in just a tshirt and underwear, no shoes. Same old behavior, just running away. I knew then that I made the right decision. Of course, me divorcing her doesn’t change her behavior. She will act like this with anyone she’s with, most likely. And in those cases I won’t be there to try to shield my daughter from it and remove her from the situation. Last night I had to tell my wife to calm down for the sake of our daughter, to not behave that way around her. I know that children are still affected by this stuff even if not direct witnesses. The idea of just not being there and not knowing who she might get involved with next terrifies me. So she’s living here for now. I’m fine with that. Most days aren’t like yesterday. Right now, she’s sitting in the same room as me working on something and everything is peaceful. I can’t make her leave anyway since it’s her house too, legally. Today she was calmer and it was an ok day. For the most part we have a good routine down with caring for our daughter. This arrangement won’t last forever, but I’m in now rush for her to leave. Ultimately, I’d prefer to sell the house and split the proceeds. This is what I’ve put in the paperwork I filed; however, we can come to an agreed upon date by which to list the house and it doesn’t have to be next week or even next month. I’ve already started looking at new places to live, but I don’t feel the need to rush it. I’m tired of just having so much going on, so much in my plate to think about and worry about. I’d just like to relax for a damn second. The stress I’ve been feeling, my blood pressure is probably through the roof. THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP's OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 7 submitted by /u/Direct-Caterpillar77 to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/Other_Salt3889 My wife is addicted to the gym and it’s ruining our marriage Originally posted to r/TrueOffMyChest & r/survivinginfidelity BoRU 1 BoRU 2 BoRU 3 BoRU 4 Editor's Note: Due to the updates being large, detailed tldr's have been made to the forst 7 posts to give a summary of them. If you would like the full posts, please see the previous BoRU Thank you to the amazing u/JebWynch for the tldr's Thanks to u/Small-Bodybuilder160 for letting me know this updated TRIGGER WARNING: infidelity, physical violence, anger management issues Original Post Feb 1, 2024 OP’s Wife (30f) has always been fit but has been increasingly passionate about working out over the last 1.5 years, returning to a gym she had previously left due to her busy schedule. the gym slowly started taking over her schedule- both weekend days, and every weekday pre- and post-work. going to the gym becomes the solution for any stress, fights, crisis- everything is Gym to the point where if Wife misses a “session” it affects her mood negatively, as OP says, “like a junkie not getting her fix”. As Wife is now 4mo pregnant, OP expresses concern over the intensity of her workouts and also that he simply misses her, given all her time is now taken up by Gym. they can’t workout together, because Gym is “her time”. She won’t work out at his gym, either. Gym becomes a form of escapism from real life, a compulsion, essentially- and no problems Wife is running away from ever really get solved because Gym is simply not the solution Wife seems to think it is. Gym has become so prevalent that family members, friends start making comments on how much time Wife and Gym spend together. Update Feb 11, 2024 OP shares that he had originally laughed over comments on his post that speculated about infidelity, but quickly came to discover they were correct. Wife has been sleeping with Guy From Gym, who she had mentioned to OP countless times as a “gym friend”. There is confrontation- OP breaks Wife’s phone, Wife hits OP. OP leaves for a short period of time and returns to Wife, who, though remorseful, will not admit to exactly what infidelities she’s committed. Update 1 ends with OP feeling guilt for his rage, left with 0 answers as to exactly what’s going on with Wife. Update 2 - My wife admitted to an affair Feb 12, 2024 aaaaaaaand Wife admits to an affair. She “felt bad” about it, but not bad enough to not sleep with Guy From Gym pretty quickly. She might even be in love with him, she doesn’t know (or won’t say). And oh, there’s a chance the child she’s currently pregnant with might not be OP’s. She’ll get a paternity test though! Stellar work, Wife. My wife is moving in with her AP, they’re “in love” Feb 22, 2024 Guy From Gym and Wife (who will still be referred to as Wife….. for now……) are moving in together. She’s not getting the paternity test. OP expresses sadness for her- that she just cant be alone, or seem to work through her mess on her own. Wife had been with OP since she was 20, and OP theorizes she is codependent. Guy From Gym allegedly doesn’t care if the baby isn’t his, he’s happy to play house with OP’s Wife. My wife has agreed to a paternity test Feb 29, 2024 Shocker, Guy From Gym wants a paternity test so a paternity test they will get! In follow up comments, OP reveals the results say he is in fact the father. And update on my wife’s affair and pregnancy March 15, 2024 OP is now conflicted. He has gone from excited to be a father, to not being sure he’s going to be a father at all, to now knowing he will be the father of a child born into the disaster that Wife has created. There is a small but non physical confrontation between OP and Guy From Gym when Wife brings him to OP’s house to gather things she needs, and OP tells Guy From Gym to leave or he’s gonna punch him. OP and Wife have private words upstairs, Wife is just sooooo in love with Guy From Gym, she can’t help it! Predictably, confrontation becomes physical when OP returns to his living room to see Guy From Gym still standing there despite the warning, and so OP follows through and cold clocks him. Update 5 closes with OP and Wife still legally married, but Wife dedicated to living with and loving Guy From Gym. Another installment of the implosion which is my marriage Apr 10, 2024 OP’s Wife(?) is still pergananté, 26 weeks. OP and Wife have agreed that he will be the one in the delivery room when the baby is born, and Guy From Gym will not be present. Guy from Gym has a big problem with this, of course, because having an affair with and housing another man’s pregnant wife simply would not be enough. OP prepares to sell the marital house and split the profit. He gets to keep their dog, thank god. Wife’s sister shares with OP that Wife is already complaining about Guy From Gym, that he’s selfish, hangs out away from home too much, etc……birds of a feather and whatnot. OP ends the update expressing that he is at least happy his (Soon-To-Be-Ex) Wife is miserable. I’m still alive May 19, 2024 I’m still alive. I’m mainly posting here because several people have reached out to me and were concerned that I’d taken my own life. No, I’m not on the brink of ending my life. I think I’m doing better than I have since all of this started. Around the time of my last post, my story blew up and I was getting messages from people who saw it on TikTok and YouTube. I had to take a step back because it was a little overwhelming. I have over 100 unread messages here. I appreciate it but it was a little uncomfortable at the time, and I got to the point where I didn’t really want to talk about the situation with my wife and her AP anymore. So as of today, our baby is due in less than 10 weeks. We’re in the home stretch now. I don’t feel prepared at all. All of this other stuff has just been so distracting. I started working on a nursery. It’s not done yet, but I have the floor finished and the walls painted. My ex-wife was impressed with the color scheme and furniture I chose. She’s not legally my ex-wife yet but I’ve started calling her that. It sort of makes it easier. I also packed up a bunch of her stuff. Originally I refused to spend my time packing up her things, but eventually just said screw it and started packing it. I’m at the point where it’ll just be easier to not see all of her stuff around here. Why did I leave it for so long? She came over to get some of the boxes I packed up. She came alone. Things were fine between us. I loaded the stuff into her car. We didn’t argue. At one point she started to tear up and said she fucked up. I said yeah she did, but there’s no point talking about it now. She shit all over our marriage. She has her muscle bound asshole to go home to now anyway so who cares. She said “I know, but it’s not the same.” I told her nothing has been the same since she decided to fuck him the first time. Supposedly he’s going to “let” me be in the delivery room when my baby is born. I didn’t even argue it when she said it like that, but inside I was boiling at the idea of him letting me be there for the birth of my child. She says she talked to him and he agreed it wouldn’t really be right to not allow me to be there. I’m going to take what I can get if it means being there for the birth of my child. I’m going to try to just ignore him for the time being. She was acting all sweet and laying on all of the “I really want you there. I really need you there” stuff and I know mentally I’m not in a place to be that cold to her when she starts acting that way. I’m trying to be indifferent more than anything else but it’s so hard when she’s actually around and starts looking at me a certain way and making me feel bad. She invited me over to see the nursery they have set up at his house. I’m not sure I can bring myself to go into another man’s house and look at the nursery set up for my kid. I did ask her if she was truly safe there though. I don’t know why, it’s just been bothering me. As pissed as I still am, I don’t want to find out he’s mistreating her and I definitely don’t want my kid to be going into an unsafe household. I haven’t told her about anything her sister has told me. They probably won’t last but as of right now there’s a very good chance my newborn baby will be going home to his house. It kills me to think about. It’s almost soul destroying to think about if I dwell on it too long. She says she’s fine. He genuinely loves her. He’s great with kids. He accepts that she’s having a baby and that this is part of the package. She insists it’s not weird because she wasn’t pregnant when anything started between them. I asked her why she did it…why did she ever let anything start between them in the first place. She said “I don’t know.” Then went into “I don’t want to talk about this” mode and left pretty soon after. Typical behavior from her - just run away. Overall I’m doing ok. I’m not sitting here depressed and drinking a bottle of scotch every night anymore. I mean on occasion, but for the most part no. I feel more used to my new normal now, and that’ll all change yet again pretty soon. ADDITIONAL INFO There is a draft of a custody plan now, but the court won’t approve anything until after the baby is born. Right now she’s in agreement but there’s plenty of time for her to change her mind (or for him to convince her to change her mind). She plans to breastfeed, but with agreement that she’ll pump and the baby can drink from a bottle when not with mom. Everything I’ve read says a baby ideally needs to spend time with each parent frequently, without gaps that are too long in between, and it’s best if each parent is feeding, changing, bathing, etc. during their time. At this time she’s in agreement with all of this. I can say that she’s not said or done anything to indicate she wants to restrict my time with the baby, other than the whole delivery room thing. She seems to want me to be involved in that respect. I hope she sticks to her word. If not, I will be fighting it through legal means. I’m a dad July 2, 2024 I have a baby. A little girl. I’m a dad. She was born yesterday at 11:57 pm, 2 weeks early. As he’s done before, she was having some pains off and on and he left for work yesterday morning. She works from home on Mondays. She told me around 8:30 am she was having contractions 17 minutes apart. The same thing happened not long ago but then by evening all the pains stopped. I was at work so I told her to keep me posted. A little later she said they were 15 minutes apart and she had some other signs it might be actual labor starting. I asked her if she needed somebody there with her. She said wanted me to come be with her. I didn’t even mean to volunteer myself. She was scared. I didn’t even ask why she didn’t call him. I left work and went over to his house. Uncomfortable doesn’t begin to describe it but there were obviously more important things going on. He wasn’t there. She didn’t even contact him. She said she just wanted it to be me and her there. In her words, he hadn’t seen her pee or shit herself yet but I’ve witnessed all of that stuff already so she was more comfortable with me there. I really tried to be as nice and supportive as possible. Set the whole thing about her affair, our marriage, everything to the side for a brief time. I don’t really know what my purpose was being there but I think she just needed somebody there so she didn’t feel alone. She spent most of the time stretching and doing some sort of yoga labor routine and bouncing on this huge exercise ball. I twiddled my thumbs for the most part and looked through a bunch of his belongings. I was timing the contractions and they were consistent and slowly did get closer together, so I thought it was probably actually going to happen. It wasn’t nearly far enough along to go to the hospital yet and it was getting close to when he’d get home. I was planning how I’d handle that when she called me into the bathroom to ask her if I thought her water broke. It wasn’t like in the movies with this huge gush of water. So he got home and I was there. He came into the house and the first thing he asked is “what are you doing here?!” I think he thought something else was going on. No, you just left and went to work and left her alone when she was scared. He said he was home and he’d be with her until it was time to go to the hospital. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something like “thanks, bud…I got it from here and we’ll call you when we’re on the way to the hospital.” He called me bud. I told him I wasn’t his fucking buddy and to fuck off. I could tell she wanted me to leave. I’m not sure she really wanted me to leave so much as she was in labor and the tension between the two of us wasn’t what she needed and I knew that. It was his house so what was I supposed to do? I left and prayed they’d actually call me instead of letting me know the next day that my kid had been born. She texted me a few hours later to say the doctor told her to go to the hospital. At that point I still didn’t know if I was going to be waiting outside or what he’d decide was best for his apparent wife and child. I was allowed to be in the room. I didn’t force my way in there. She said she wanted me to be there. He was there too. By far the single most awkward experience of my life and the only reason I was able to excuse it was because she told me she wanted me there and I didn’t want to miss the chance to be there when my kid was born and to hold my kid before he did. I can’t imagine what the doctors and nurses were thinking. Fucking humiliating. Then the guy tried to police what I could see. I put the baby in there! He’s fucking watching and it’s like this is still my wife and that’s my baby. I chose to stay dignified and I ignored him the entire time. I was there to do whatever she told me to do and my focus wasn’t on him, but in any other setting I don’t think I would have been able to hold back. The baby came flying out. I mean, as far as labor goes. These are the nurses’ words and I trust labor and delivery nurses to know what they’re talking about. She tore very bad because the baby came out so fast. The baby is so tiny, barely 6 pounds and only 18 inches, but perfectly healthy. I went home for a short rest although I really couldn’t rest at all. I went back today and of course he was there. Surprisingly he said he was going to give us some time alone with the baby. Not sure if she had previously asked him to do that when I showed up or not, didn’t ask. He even brought us all food back when he returned a few hours later. I wondered if mine might be poisoned but I tried to be nice. He’s still not gone so I’m wondering how long he’ll be around. I just can’t let myself do anything that will make her try to keep me away from my daughter now. I don’t want them making it difficult for me. I’d prefer not to share her name publicly but I can confirm it’s the name we chose for a daughter years ago. He had no say and he hasn’t said anything about the name at all. It kills me to see him holding her though. I eventually left because it was just too much sitting there pretending to be like some bizarre three’s company. I’ll know I will get my time with her when he’s not around. He’s already posting them on his social media. I don’t know how I’m going to do this but I’m going to figure it out. I just have to find a way to be the bigger person because I won’t let him or their relationship discourage me from being my daughter’s dad. I totally get doing anything for your kids now and if it means having to pretend to get along with him, I will RELEVANT/ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM OOP It’s not about pick me. I just have a hard time not caring about her anymore. The fact that she was carrying my child made it a lot more difficult. Otherwise, I could have and would have cut all ties with her. I don’t know, still feel the need to protect her or help her. Hopefully it’ll get easier now that she and the baby are two separate people. Honestly, I’m considering doing something pretty stupid. She’s getting discharged from the hospital early tomorrow morning. I don’t want them to go home with him, so thinking about asking her to come home to our house instead. It’s ridiculous and setting us up for disaster. It wouldn’t be to be with her. I don’t want my newborn baby going home to another man’s house. I don’t think it’s for the baby’s sake that I want to stop it. It’s be for my sake. But it’s not like we’d be divorced and living together forever. So, we’d live together for some period of time but eventually we’d go our separate ways, date other people, and so on. I can’t trust her again. That would probably be worse for our kid in the long run. At least by being in 2 separate homes in the first place this will just be the norm for her and she won’t have to go through that heartache of being one family splitting into 2. I just don’t know how I’m going to be able to handle seeing my child going home from the hospital to his house. I’m honestly scared to be present when they’re discharged because I’m not sure I can control myself. ~ I caved and I asked her to come home with me when they was discharged from the hospital. I framed it more like “if you don’t want to go home with him, you don’t have to.” I let her know she could come home to our house if she wanted to. She said she can’t. Why? Because he’s done so much for her. He moved her into his house. They have a whole nursery set up. He loves her. I don’t love her anymore after what she did (her words), but he loves her and accepts her even with the baby. She thinks she’ll never find anyone who will love her and love our baby too so she can’t risk losing him. I tried to tell her she doesn’t owe him anything. Just because he let her move in and there’s a nursery there doesn’t mean she’s indebted to him, especially not when it comes to something this big. She said “I want to, but I just can’t. I’m sorry.” I left. I told her I couldn’t sit there and watch the get into his car and go to his house. As a consolation I got a “you can come over and see her tomorrow.” Great. I know she did this. This is all her doing. But why am I the one feeling like I failed. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t immediately shut her out. I basically just pushed her to him. OOP on the AP posting pictures of the baby online Today I told him he can’t post pictures of her online. He said he was just posting a few pictures to say how proud and happy he was of MY wife, wasn’t weird. I said he can post her all he wants but he can’t post the baby. He didn’t seem to be taking it seriously so I told him I know he wishes he’d won this one, but he didn’t. She’s my kid, not his. If he’s genuine about being all buddy buddy and respecting me as the actual father, he’ll respect my request. He said ok, he understood. We’ll see. NEW UPDATES Life update July 24, 2024 Many people have asked for an update on my situation, but I’ve been pretty busy. There’s the baby, plus a week of completely unrelated but neverending annoying problems. Remember that book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Thats the week I’ve been having, but I’m not even going to get into it beyond saying I can’t even stay at my own house right now due to a giant hole in the wall. I’ve been dealing with insurance and contractors all day, and they hit a water pipe. I’m still on paternity leave and continue to regularly spend time with my daughter. We have a set schedule for when my daughter comes to stay with me, so I’ve been spending less time over at his house. Sometimes my wife needs help during the day though, or just to be able to take a shower or a nap, so I will stop over to help her. Really, I just want to take advantage of any opportunity I can to spend time with her my baby and bond with her. Plus, breastfeeding isn’t working out very well. She’s still not producing enough milk and I know she’s upset about it but it sort of makes things easier for me. At least she has help when the baby is with her (supposedly he helps, gets up at night, etc.) I’m on my own, and I won’t lie and say it’s a walk in the park, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. The other day she called me and asked me to come over. She said she was on the verge of a mental breakdown. I’ve heard that line from her many times, when she was cheated on me without my knowledge, and it was usually mostly related to her job. I got over there and she was saying she can’t handle being a mom, she can’t handle life, she can’t function. She was crying. This time she couldn’t run off the the gym. She would if she could but she’s not really allowed to exercise yet. She won’t talk to anyone, won’t seek professional help. Some days she seems much better than others. She’s just an easily overwhelmed person. Everything overwhelms her. Sometimes we have, dare I say, a good time together. The most she can really go as far as physical activity right now is walk. We took the baby in her longest walk yet and walked from his house to my house. Everything was fine in the walk. She was in a good mood. We were joking around. Then she turned really sad after being at my house/our former shared house after a little while. She finally admitted that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, raising our daughter between 2 homes. She said my home is our daughter’s real home and she’s only supposed to have one home. Then she started sobbing about not having a home anymore. My house isn’t her home and her boyfriend gumbro’s house isn’t her home and she’s essentially homeless and doesn’t belong anywhere. She admitted she fucked up really badly and she doesn’t want to share custody or to only see her daughter half the time. She “just wants to come home” but she loves “him” and she thinks he loves her and our daughter and she doesn’t want to hurt him after he’s done “all this” for her. I said so what? What she wants for her kid should be more important than his feelings. If he can’t get over the fact that the married, pregnant woman who he was sleeping with wants her kid to grow up in a single home with her actual father, he can fuck off. He can fuck off anyway. If she can’t tell him and wants me to tell him, I will. She doesn’t think she can tell him. I told her this is her biggest issue - communication and honesty. Just tell people the truth and stop being a pussy about ever telling anyone the truth about how you really feel. Thing is, I’ve been tolerating him lately. Don’t like him, but tolerate him. I’m not hanging out with him. Ever. I know it sounds crazy coming from me, but I think he’s genuinely in this. Still shouldn’t have been fucking my wife. Doesn’t absolve him of any of his involvement. He’s back to being cloyingly nice to me. Suggesting we hang out, try to be friends. He’s so fucking happy all the time. It’s a little unsettling but I think he’s just one of those people and maybe that’s what she likes about him. I’m not one of those people, never will be. So anyway, she and I sort of got into an argument - started as a discussion, turned into an argument, then morphed back to a discussion…all about everything we don’t like about each other and our relationship. In the end, we were both able to say what we need from the other person. Shes just too overwhelmed right now and can’t make any changes. She can’t handle trying to change right now. It gives her too much anxiety. So, I don’t know. We’re sort of at an impasse right now. Then this stuff with the house, I’ve just been extra stressed and not really all that pleasant to deal with. My wife has “moved home” for now July 28, 2024 This month continues to be the strangest I’ve ever experienced. The repairs to my house were made and I’m back home thankfully. I can only take a few night under my parents’ roof. I slept with somebody else. We went out on a date. I think we both just wanted to have sex to say we’d finally gotten over our former spouses. Shes the ex-wife of a friend of mine. She and I are actually closer/better friends now than her ex-husband and I. Several people have suggested that we start dating each other. We get along great and we are on the surface a really good match, but it was too fucking weird for both of us. She’s very attractive, very social and fun to be around, and has been incredibly kind to me during this whole ordeal, but I can’t see her as more than a friend. I had been intentionally avoiding sleeping with anyone else. I hadn’t been with anyone since the last time I slept with my wife. That feels like an eternity ago. For the longest time I wasn’t interested in being with other women. Then, it sort of morphed into my way of feeling morally superior to her. I was going to hold out and not pursue anything until after we were divorced. It’s pretty pointless and childish. Just a dumb way to make myself feel better and to be able to say I never cheated. I still don’t feel like I cheated - there is no marriage anymore. Within hours of this happening, I started getting texts from my wife saying she decided she wants to come home. It’s like she had some sort of with sense. She was saying she was ready, would I come help her. I called her and told her I don’t want her to come home and to be in a relationship again. She doesn’t get to just decide that’s what’s going to happen. She then started to say “oh I know, I just meant move back in.” I told her I didn’t really believe her and felt like she was just jerking me around again. She said she thought our conversation the other day had gone so well and that she thought we seem to be at a place where we could really work on fixing everything, but until then she could live in another room. She said she was completely serious about it and she wants our daughter to be in one home. I feel so mixed about everything, but ultimately I want my daughter living in my house 24/7 and I don’t want another man helping to raise her, so I took the bait. Today I showed up at his house to help her move some things, but I anticipated I’d get there and she’d either have changed her mind or she wouldn’t have been planning to leave at all and was only waiting to see me do some more tricks for her. They were arguing when I got there. The baby was crying, she was crying and running around packing things in bags, and he was following behind her begging her to stay, offering to do anything to make her stay. He accused me of this being my idea. Maybe it was, idk. I don’t really care what he thinks. It was obvious she had just sprung this news on him shortly before I got there. She was telling her over and over that she just wants her child raised in one home and that his home wasn’t really their home and she was sorry she was doing this to him after everything he’d done but she just has to give our daughter one home with her real father. We got back over to my house and she’s obviously an emotional mess. I have no room prepared for her. Not 15 minutes later he shows up at the front door. She didn’t want to talk to him. He wouldn’t give up and eventually he was there on the front porch loudly saying things like “that’s not what you were saying when you were blowing me last night!” So at that point, after I’m sure our neighbors had been enjoying this embarrassing scene long enough, I told him if he didn’t leave I’d call the cops. I went out there and tried to calm him down, I mean, I had to sympathize with him…she runs away, that’s what she does. I may have said a few other things in my own favor and to make him realize he doesn’t want to be involved in this mess that is my wife. I don’t think he’ll give up so easily. It sounds terrible, but once she was at my house I sort of found myself wishing she’d leave with him. I know I’d had wanted her to come home, and I tell myself it was mostly due to the baby, but now I’m wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into. She said “I didn’t really blow him last night. I haven’t done anything with him since she was born. I’ve only been thinking about you.” I told her yeah right, you expect me to believe it? Even if it’s true, what on earth makes you think I’d ever believe anything that you say? Then out of spite I told her I slept with somebody else. I know I only told her to hurt her, and I feel bad about it now. She immediately demanded to know who. I told her it wasn’t her business. She claims it is her business because we’re still married. Nope, I’m not sharing. So, now we’re awkwardly existing. I don’t have much faith that she’s going to stay here. I think she’ll be back at his place within the week. I’ve told her that he’s not allowed over here. He has no business being here. And if we’re raising our daughter in the same house, together, then she can’t just run off to his house to be with him whenever she feels like it - it won’t work that way. She says she knows, and she wants me to want to be with her again and she’ll prove to me she can be a good partner. She tried to kiss me and I rejected her. She’s upset. She’s taking a nap now. I feel like I’ve dug myself into a very deep hole now. RELEVANT COMMENTS Smoke-Thin-Mints Brother you better get her out of that house and fast oml OOP I was really doing a good job of tolerating the guy since they came home from the hospital. I don’t like him and never will like him, but I don’t believe he had any nefarious intentions with my daughter. However, my heart broke every time I had to leave my little girl over there at another man’s house. Or when I’d go over there to pick her up and he greet me at the door holding my baby, talking to her like he was her dad! No, that’s one of the lowest feelings in the world. So, for these reasons I’m happy to have them here. I just don’t know how this can or will work with her mother living here. ~ dcphoto78 Is this really the environment you want your child to grow up in? OOP No, not at all. But I also don’t want her growing up in another man’s home. What I’m worried about is my wife dragging her back and forth - I’ve told her she can’t do that, it’s not fair to me or our child. ~ Purple_Bishop2 If you really don’t want your daughter being raised half-time by AP, your only real option is to truly attempt to reconcile, but it’s pretty clear neither of you really want to reconcile with each other - it’s just that neither of you want to be apart from your daughter. If she is going to live with you for even a couple of days you need to have some tenderness in your heart for her and be willing to lovingly interact with her and your daughter. Your WW is postpartum and an emotional wreck so if you gray rock or get angry shit will go south fast in a way that won’t be good for your daughter. All other paths lead to 50/50 custody and acceptance of AP having a role in your daughter’s life. Be civil (not friendly, civil) to AP as you say your WW loves him and will likely go back to him soon. If you and AP are at war it will be terrible for your daughter. OOP I’m going to be nice. We sat on the porch while it was storming outside tonight and she was talking to the baby and said “This is how it should be, [daughter’s name], mommy, and daddy.” Several rude comments immediately popped into my brain but I kept them to myself I figure I might as well enjoy it while I can. Well, enjoy having my daughter her and maybe pretending we’re a normal family for an hour. I’m not actually enjoying having my wife here right now. It’s not making me feel good. I didn’t mind when she was here the other day when we took a walk and came over here but today I’m really not enjoying her being here. I’m going to keep that to myself. OOP Has made a new post after the BoRU Another update from this spineless pussy Aug 5, 2024 I don’t really have an update, but I’m mainly making this post because I’ve received a ton of comments on my previous post and it’s gotten too big to really follow anymore. When I get a notification that somebody has responded to my post or comment, I click on it and it should take me directly to the person’s comment, but it doesn’t. So I have to scroll through all of the comments to find the one I want to respond to. I don’t have time to scroll through 800 comments. I don’t respond to some comments by choice. I get it, many people think I’m a doormat and need to grow a spine. What can I really say? We can trade places and you can tell me how easy it is to navigate this and then we’ll talk. I did plan to divorce her. The papers are ready. I admit that I have stalled in having her served. I can’t put into words why. The lawyer wanted to do it back in July 29 and I told him I needed more time. I’m kind of embarrassed by my hesitation. But this is my life and it’s very easy for completely uninvolved bystanders to advocate for divorce and all sorts of unrealistic things like getting sole custody of my daughter. If I needed to take on sole custody, you bet I would. My wife isn’t crazy. I get that you all have a very bad perception of her. I’ve created that perception. Well, I didn’t create that image - I’ve simply shared the truth about her actions, so she’s created that image. That’s all anyone reading my posts knows about her, nothing good. She does have some good qualities, and believe me, I didn’t want to let myself remember or acknowledge any of them for a long time. She’s don’t horrible things, hurtful things, incredibly selfish things. She is an emotional person. She’s a highly stressed, anxious person who tends to live on by the whims of her emotions. I’m not saying it’s not tiring and frustrating at times or even most of the time, but I’m telling you that she’s not crazy. She’s not an immediate danger to the safety of our baby. She’s not doing anything that’s going to make a court give me full custody. Do I think she’s in the best possible place to raise a whole human being? No. I mean, either am I, but she has a lot of work to do and I know that. We weren’t planning to have a baby when she got pregnant. I would not have purposely conceived a baby at that time because she was sort of already a mess prior to finding out she was pregnant. But there’s a difference between that and being legitimately unstable to the point of not being able to tend to the basic needs of her child. She’s doing that. She actually seems less of a mess and less anxious than she was a year ago this time, when she was having her weekly meltdowns. She also owns our home along with me. Sure, I’ve always paid the mortgage, but the courts don’t really care who’s been paying the mortgage when the house is in both of our names. I can’t just kick her out. We had planned to sell the house and split the proceeds. Honestly, it seemed like the easiest and quickest solution. Houses are selling very fast around here and we’d make a profit. It stings to have to split the profits but it wasn’t a hill I wanted to die on. I think it’s ultimately best for my child to have her mother involved in her life and to develop a bond with her mom, regardless of where her mom ends up living or what the relationship between the two of us is like. I also think the safety and wellbeing of my child’s mother is important for my child. She needs a place to live. I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed some of the moments of normalcy we’ve had. It’s ok if you want to say I’m rugsweeping. I’m just so fucking tired. I’m tired of being angry, tired of being sad, tired of all the drama. So to have a few days days where life feels like it used to when my life was much less complicated, and to just sit around doing mundane things together without necessarily thinking about this big master plan, divorce, reconciliation, custody, etc. feels sort of good. I feel like I can catch my breath for a second. If you want to call me spineless because I’m enjoying finally having those moments that I always dreamed we’d have together with our first child, so be it. There are still moments in feel annoyed. I kind of liked living in my own. I got used to it, or I thought I had. Sometimes it feels like she’s invading my space, but I’m handling it the best that I can. There are still things I love about her. There are some things I now hate about her. I hate things that she did. I guess I love who she used to be, but sometimes she shows glimpses of that person and I miss her. I admit that I really do miss that person I fell in love with. We’ve been together since I was 22, she was 20. Most of our adult lives. We moved in together after only a few months. We’ve experienced most adult things together, good and bad. We lived in a few shit hole apartments together, moved across the country together, bought and sold and then bought a house together, travelled to many places and had great adventures and made some good memories, survived COVID and the horrible DIY haircuts we gave each other, weathered job losses, car accidents, health scares, had some horrible fights, had some great make up sex, dealt with a few pregnancy scares, basically grew up together. Well, she didn’t grow up. She has a very hard time adulting. We used to be like best friends, always together. She still has a hold on me in some ways and what’s the use in trying to deny it? THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP's OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 7 submitted by /u/Direct-Caterpillar77 to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

Looking for recommendations for sleeping bags for my kids. They are 4 and 2. We camp 3-4 times a year in the Southern California area. Usually beach camping. We have a GO camper trailer that we use (basically a tent on top of a trailer). So don’t need anything for crazy cold weather. I’ve seen online they make kids sized sleeping bags but wondered if they was necessary or is it ok to just use a regular sized one? I saw an REI “kinder camp 40”. Seems good but it’s $70, and Costco has a regular adult sized Coleman 40 for $40. Anyone have any experiences/opinions on kids sleeping bags? submitted by /u/drivel111 to r/CampingandHiking [link] [comments]

OK........ It's time for my Annual Rant and Predictions, 25 Years of going to Burning Man!! I have watched the festival change from 1997's Psytrance-Hippie-Cluster-Fuck to the Bro-Step-Headache-Doosh-Fest it was in 2013, to the Deep-House-Shallow-Influencer-Hell-Hole of 2018, To the MainStage-Rich-Fuck-Tropical-Deep-House-Bullshit of 2022. I've seen the Rise and Fall of the Shirt-Cock Revolutionaries and have witnessed the Transformation of Assholes with Megaphones into Carnival Barkers inviting you to Ice Cream Socials. I have seen the fire department douse the Flames of the Burning Man after someone had lit the fire 4 days too early! I have watched with my own eyes someone sacrifice themselves to the FIRE and die in front of me. Burning Man is A Fucking Crazy Place and I Fucking Love it! May the De-Coachella-fication of Burning Man begin! So, Wet yer Burn-gina's and polish yer Burn-sack's...It's Time for 2023's Rant and Pre-dick-tions with Zapper Jones! ​ For those of you who may not know me, my full time job and life's work is with the Burning Man Cultural Preservation Society. We are NOT funded by the B-org and work directly against the Cultural Direction Committee to stop the atrocities and crimes against our culture that they commit. (Fuck Their Burn) We Believe in a Natural Burning Man EcoSystem that Co-Creates alongside the Burning Man Festival, rather than a Culture that is dictated by The B-Org and its polluting elements. After all, The B-Org are Responsible for the Cultural Extinction of many Burner-Species... Including the loss of the entire Genus (Shirtcockuis-Insania), The extinction of the SubSpecies (Loudis Musicianus), And the removal of (Bendovis-Foranus) to name a few. Our number one focus is on the conservation of Old Naked Dudes on Bikes (Nudus-Promoveo), for they are the Heart of the Cultural Ecosystem of Burning Man. Sadly the population has dwindled to Near-extinction. Last year there was only one documented sighting of an Old Naked Dude on a Bike. Unfortunately this single Majestic-Grey-Bearded-Roller was headed westbound...the wrong way from the festival on the other side of 7:00 and J. Scientists don't know why this last precious-specimen was lost and confused. It is believed the hashtagging might be interfering with their internal compass. Also it's well known in the scientific community That Old Naked Dudes on Bikes have no natural immunity to Coachella infections. And that can often lead to a terminal case of EDC. Thus the population is on the very edge of extinction. PREDICTIONS: ​ THE WEATHER: I hope it's fucked. We really need another year of bad weather to clear out the last of the Hashtaggers, Tourists and Rich-Dick-Heads. Burning Man is at its best when the weather is at its worst! I hope we have a fuck'n blizzard! THE THEME: The Furry convention theme is AWESOME. It’s honestly about time that we had a specific sexual fetish themed year. Our B-Org-friend is just trying to spice up the relationship. It’s the same Ol’ Dusty-Burner-Dick we have all sucked on before, but this time we are gonna dress up like Animals while having group sex, instead of fucking each other while dressed up as Robots or whatever the forgettable Theme was last year. THE MUSIC: The hashtag Burning Man Instagram culture of the Deep-Doosh-Bag-Deep-Playa-Artcar-Deep-House-Music has finally fallen out of fashion! It was only a matter of time before this shallow deep house music bubble collapsed. The Deep Playa house music sunrise scene has always been fake as fuck, and now that most of that Fake bitcoin money that was funding A Fake scene for Fake likes is gone, we will be seeing less PhotoShoots, Selfies, Over-Priced-Bedazzled-General-Hats, Hashtags and Doosh-Bags. This year Business Techno will continue it's Corporate Takeover Of the Music of Burning Man. Business Techno is back in Business and Business is Booming! The Business Techno TikTok crowd that is the new Dooshy-Dance-Music-Craze at Burning Man now. You will see more lip-syncing TikTokers doing stupid dance challenges to retarded music at completely inappropriate times. But it's a whole hell of a lot better than seeing someone hire a professional photographer to get more Instagram likes! We will also see a large number of Tinder-Profile-Tech-House-DJs with no personalities playing to empty dancefloors. Tech-House Music is Basically the 2014 Toyota Camry of electronic music. ARTCARS: This is a great year for Artcars! Now that the Burning Man Mainstage went up in smoke, people might actually give two-tits about Artcars again. They are a fun way to meet new people...then get Stranded by those people when they decide to park at the trash fence for 4 hours for no fucking reason. You get off...Then watch as the Same Artcar drives by after you have walked most of the way back to camp sweating your taint off. All I know Is: Never get on an Artcar at sunrise! You will regret this decision within the first 10 minutes of realizing how Fucking Far from your camp they’re driving. Followed by the unsettling realization that you still have only Night Clothes on and it's going to get hotter than the Devil's-Dick-N-Balls in about 20 minutes!! And that HOT-COCK-OF-FIREY-DEATH is gonna start scorching thru your Faux Fur coat. Oh and of course you are going to need to Piss once the time is completely inappropriate and impossible. An Artcar at sunrise is only going to One of Two Equally SHITTY-TERRIBLE-THINGS. Either being parked at Robot Heart in the Hot Fucking Sun or being parked at The Trash Fence in the Hot Fucking Sun. Both of these are the last Fucking place you want to be when the sun is coming up at Burning Man. THE ART: I think it speaks loud volumes that the most talked about and thought provoking Deep Level Art-Work that Spoke to the Hearts of almost ALL of us last year was........"WHORE ISLAND!!" Those Words were Spray-Painted in LARGE GRAFFITI LETTERS on the backside of the Deep Playa PortaPotties Brought Joy and Wonder to Thousands of people. It was the realest Art the Deep Playa has seen in Years. The B-Org can post up as many Gentrification-Honey-Bear-Wheat-Paste-Posters as they want but REAL streetart is something that comes from pure culture! However its impact becomes meaningless once given funding. That's why the Honey-Bears Fucking Suck. People who make STREET-ART-FOR-PROFIT have no business placing their capitalist signature on the Playa. It would have been fine if he had wanted to make other art for the event that didn't have his signature icon. But because B-Org is in Bed with selling his artwork, it's OK for him to put up His signature Honey Bears. This year the B-Org is going to sell a Bansky Portrait and Auction it off to the highest bidder in a pathetic attempt to follow up on the Honey Bears Street Cred. The proceeds will go to some sort of Artist Depreciation and Allocation of Funds or whatever the fuck it is that the Rich-Artworld-SF-Gallery-Types do out there at Fly Ranch. The B-Org showers High-End-Art-Garllery-Artist with funding in hopes of luring bigger investors into their FlyTrap Ranch artwork money-making scheme. It's basically NFT culture but with large scale art sold to the highest bidder, to be used as a sideshow on the Las Vegas Strip or to be used as novelty at Coachella THEME CAMPS: Now that the MainStage isn't touring through town this year, People might actually start to give a dick-shake about Theme Camps again! Last Year Sunrise on the 9 0’Clock side was an awesome place to be. Bubbles & Bass in the shade with champagne and Random Ribs next door was a much needed relief from the Instagram-Hashtag-Hell-Hole-Sunrise that the Deep Playa Artcar Scene provides. Deep Playa is a miserable experience in the best of circumstances and becomes more gruesome and horrific as the sun starts coming up. Even for the Fucksticks on electric bikes crowd, it's hard to justify being that far away from everything with no shade, no bathrooms that don't have a 30-minute wait time, no booze and a bunch of Over-Heated-Stressed-Out-Hashtaggers trying to keep up with dying Deep-House trends while Law Enforcement circles like Hyenas picking off Big Dumb Ketamine-Intoxicated Wildebeests one-by-one, as they wander too far from the herd. Come back home to the Esplanade, where all the good stuff is! The Esplanade offers a wider variety of music and spaces all conveniently located next to each other. And it's at least a mile closer to your camp. Most of these camps offer such things as, Shade, Comfort, Booze, and Food. You fucking dipshits are missing out on the good stuff. Hashtag FuckYourSunRise Hashtag EsplanadeRules Hashtag NORTH-SIDE-BRC-4-LIFE THE MAN: The Man will continue to become Smaller, Lamer, and Less Impressive in general, all in the name of Eco-Shaming. Like Bitchy-Low-Blood-Sugar-Gluten- Free-Vegans on a Paleo-Diet, the B-Org wants us to suffer so that we FEEL like we are doing something good for ourselves and the planet...when in reality it's just virtue signaling, and not doing anything besides hurting ourselves and making everyone around us hate us even more. TICKETS: Well if it's not completely obvious to you by now the reason there are so many extra tickets this year is because the MainStage burned down while on Tour in Mexico! Don't act surprised!! Last year there was definitely 20,000 people who where there JUST FOR THE MAINSTAGE, and Burning Man was a crazy backdrop to the MonoLink concert series being live broadcasted worldwide on YOUTUBE with more collective hashtags, hits, subscriptions, comments and plays than all of the B-Org's youtube documentary videos combined. If you watch back last year’s Monolink Concert Series you can clearly see Ten's of Thousands of Affluent-White-Yoga-Instructors and Dudes-in-Sunhats-with-Pointy-Beards as far out into the horizon. WHAT? You didn't think that the MainStage was that popular? YA, It's because the Deep-Playa-Deep-House-Shallow-Personality-Crowd never interacted with the rest of Burning Man. You Never saw or Met them as the glided by on electric bikes out to Deep Playa. You missed them because they were sitting in air conditioned RV's doing ketamine all day long and only venture out to the MainStage for a few sunrise selfie sessions to prove to their less-rich friends that they went. Hashtag-Sunrise-At-Burning-Man. You won't even notice they are gone. FUCKSTICKS ON ELECTRIC BIKES: Fucksticks on Electric bikes reported the largest number of injuries ever at Burning Man last year! I think it's awesome that so many K-tarded-Fucksticks totally fucked themselves up while riding too fast with no lights. It's truly hilarious that you spent $2,000 on a E-bike but couldn't afford a headlamp. Dark-wads on E-bikes will receive the karmic justice that will inevitably occur at some point in the week. I don't give a fuck about your safety. However, I do care about my own. So put some lights on that bitch and slow the fuck down. CATCHPHRAZES: “Fuck yer Burn” is Out. “Fuck yer Ticket” is In. “Suck My Burn” is still a thing. ​ Other One-Liners include..... “Do you guys know where the Aztec Princess is?” “Awww, Does somebody have a dried out Burn-gina?” “Sounds like somebody has a dusty Burn-Sack.” “Hey, you got some Coachella on your Burning Man.” “Even Worse, You got some Burning Man on your Coachella!” “Where is the MainStage?” “Slow Down, Fuckstick!” “Does anyone want to buy a TICKET?” “I think I got an EDC from that Influencer.” “Larry Harvey Please Report to the Front Gate!!” ​ ​ OK.... Here comes the RANT!!!!!! ​ The LOUD Silent Majority: Nevada State Law clearly states that we are allowed to party 24 hours a day at any volume we want! I don't make the rules. I just know how to party. Look, last time I checked, this isn't fucking California and we don't need quiet time after 2am! If Bobby And Bill from the camp across the street want to get up at 7:00am and turn on "Sweet Home Alabama" at top volume and start pounding Cold Budweiser's while waving American flags!!, you are a goddamn asshole if you don't let them Radically Express themselves. Look, it's not personally my first choice of what I would do at sunrise, but if Bobby and Bill wake me up I'm not gonna be the sort of Snitch-Bitch-Burnhole that goes and complains to the Rangers about noise. Fuck that! Burning Man is short. Instead of getting yer Burn-gina inflamed about it, why don't you stop being a Burn-sack, Fuck'n go over there and start pounding 12 ounces of freedom in a can while you sing songs about the southland. Bobby and Bill are just two cool dudes who just want to party! Your sleep is less important than their Radical Self Expression. And don't hide behind the PRINCIPAL of Civic Responsibility. FUCK YOU!!!!! You are the one being Civically Irresponsible by making noise complaints!! Bobby and Billy just want to rock out with their cocks out at 7am. Who the fuck are you to try to stop him? This City was Built on Noise and Freedom!!! Radical Self Expression MUST take priority over Civic Responsibility otherwise this place would be like every other BORING city in the USA. ABOUT THE NOISE: So the B-Org dropped some new additions to the sound system and noise policy. All Artcars in city limits are not allowed play amplified music between the hours of 2am and 10am like this is a fucking Boyscout Camp. Even worse, all Sound Systems inside of camps are to face the sound inward so that we must all hear the comb filter nightmare of un-timed quadraphonic sound. For 10 years, Placement has been bitching at camps ( and right so ) for making walls of RV's and exclusive camps. Now every camp will look like a backstage Dj Area as you roll by quietly in your Artcar. FIGHT SNITCH-CAMPS BY SNITCHING: The updated Noise Policy made something very clear: The B-org is just like every other bureaucracy in the world. It is complaint-driven!!! It's Time for us, the vast large majority of people who attend Burning Man who actually like party to speak up and put an end to the Silence. If you see a camp that does not have a big enough Sound System, make a formal complaint with B-org about the low volume. Did the camp across next door complain about music volume while having absolutely fucking nothing going on all week except a single Tu-Tu-Tuesday-Ice-Cream giveaway from the hours of 10am-11am? Fuck ‘em in the Burn, Make a Complaint! Did you see a badass Artcar roll by your camp without music on? FUCKING MAKE A COMPLAINT TO THE DMV! Make a God Damn complaint to every department the B-Org has. ​ If you have an Artcar, turn the music up as far as those amplifiers will let you and play music at top volume preferably with in a residential area......after 2am. If we all do it, the consequences are minimal. Tell Placement you want to be camped next to other loud camps, and if you do happen to be a Snitch-Camp-Member ask that you be placed next to other Snitch-Camps out in the suburbs, not anywhere close the the 9 0’Clock side. If you were wanting better placement next to where all the action and interactivity is, then don't be a Snitch-Camp. It's very simple. Snitch-Camps should be located as close as possible to Center Camp while letting the Loud Majority have the upper 9 0’Clock and 2 0’Clock sectors. We are taking names and Casting out shame all in the Name of Noise Pollution and Radical Self Expression. The Anti-Music-Quite-Time-Agenda set forth by the B-Org and enforced by Snitch-Camps must cede ground to the Loud Majority! This is a CULTURE WAR with TERRITORIAL DISPUTES!!!!!! We Will Not TURN DOWN! The choice is yours: Be a Snitch-Camp and have shitty placement next to the other Snitch-Camps, or don't be a Snitch-Camp. But PLEASE Allow at least some place within City Limits to have 24 hour nightlife without chasing the Loud Majority out to Deep Playa in Isolation. ​ Why Saturday Sucks Now and Why It's Your Camp’s Fault: Look, we all want a shower and hamburger once we get back to Reno but there is no need to start breaking down camp just because Becky and Bruce have low blood sugar and a high stress job back home. If you can afford to go to Burning Man, You can afford another day at Burning Man. We have all spent a shit ton of time, money and effort to get here...and after all of that, you Burn-wads want to take down camp on Saturday? What was once The biggest and best party day of the week, has turned into a day of stressed out Meltdowns and Packing Anxiety. What the fuck is wrong with taking down camp on Sunday or Monday like Both God and Larry Harvey intended it to be ??? Let me guess your camp decided to take down early to skip the Exodus! How did that work out for all you bunch of Burn-Tards last year? You cancelled Burning Man a day early and then bitched about being stuck in line for 12 hours. I hope you Manic-Monday-MOOP-Skippers learned your lesson. We Should STOP Doing This: That's right, it might be time for B-org to just end it. The 2030 initiative is the worst thing to happen to Burning man since Larry Harvey died. The B-Org is jumping all-in on this propagandist media PR blunder, and took what was just a dumb local situation into full-on-village-idiots-banging-their-heads-against-a-light-pole-stupidness. The B-Org is SUING a geothermal power plant project that is trying to build a large facility in Gerlach. That's RIGHT! YOUR TICKET MONEY IS BEING SPENT ON MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR LAWYERS EXPENSES OVER A LOCAL POLITICAL DISPUTE!!!! Look I agree "Fuck that Power Plant, Bro!" I'm all for The Local Conservation over the Global Conservation in this case. But from the point of view from the outside world it looks pretty hypocritical. And the Carbon Neutral 2030 initiative put forth by the B-Org makes it even worse! The B-Org went NIMBY on an Alternative Energy Company and are now are back peddling with A Dumb PR STUNT. Claiming we are reducing the Festival's carbon footprint by a fraction of a percent by making the Man fire slightly smaller and RE-Selling the Large Scale Art to LAS VEGAS Side Shows!!!! Burning Man just released an hour-long documentary that feels like watching a commercial funded by Big Oil companies that plays upbeat acoustic guitar music, while someone talks about how Big Oil companies Care about saving the earth and making it a better place. We Care......... Brought to you by Big B-Org-Petroleum-Products. It's a grueling 105 minutes of Green-Shaming Burners who want you to invest in their new green business while constantly undermining their efforts by explaining that most of carbon emissions Burning Man actually make is caused by transportation. My conclusion after watching this was that we should just stop. I don't want all of Burning Man to turn into the AEZ (alternative energy zone) Ya know? The AEZ, that whole district of Burning Man that has been there for the past 15 years that you simply walk by because there is fucking nothing going on there. Seriously, AEZ offers Zero Interactivity, No bars, No stages, Nothing but Solar-Powered silence. GREAT!! We didn't need a Uplifting-Environmental-Feel-Good-Ad-Campaign from the B-Org to support using solar energy or to support artists using recycled materials. Burning Man has been doing that over 20 years! The declaration of becoming carbon neutral is false. If we really want to make Burning Man carbon neutral.............. Then let's just STOP doing this. KIDS: The very few parents who are able to raise children cool enough to go to Burning Man while holding down a full-time job and a low-key ketamine addiction as well as a complex polyamorous relationship all at the same time deserve respect. We are all impressed, good for you. You are still an asshole for bringing your kids. Just apologize to your In-Laws about the green bean casserole comment you made at Thanksgiving 4 years ago and have them take the grandkids for the week while you do drugs and have sex with strangers at Burning Man. Do you really want to have to deal with your kids when just 30 minutes ago you and your partner gave a blow job to a guy named “Kai” in the back of Sprinter Van? “Good morning kids, Don’t mind the Van-Lifer-Wook-Dick on our breath! Now let's go walk in the blazing hot sun to a canceled workshop on the other side of the playa while Mommy and Daddy fight about who’s gonna get to go snowboarding with Kia in Colorado Springs this winter and who is gonna stay home with the kids.” There is no Larry Mouse to take photos with. Larry Harvery DID NOT BRING HIS KIDS TO BURNING MAN! You can read on the B-Org Website about his children attending the first Burning Man on Barkers Beach. What they don't tell you is: HE NEVER BROUGHT HIS KIDS TO THE PLAYA! He knew that it was a seriously dangerous situation. The early days of Burning Man were mostly a bunch of Gnarly-Gun-Shooting-High-Speed-Driving-Lunatics who where super high on Drugs! This was always a place for Adults to Engage in Adult Behavior. Previous to 2003, The B-Org had a unspoken "No Kids policy" And people were allowed to Have Sex In Public, No IDs Required at Bars, No Prohibitions on Sexually Explicit Art. No issues with the gate being shut down for 15 hours while the cops raid camps ONE-BY-ONE looking for a missing child. And if they happened to catch anyone using drugs while conducting random tent-to-tent searches of across the entire playa they are under obligation to arrest those drug smoking scumbags. Seriously, last time a child went missing at Burning Man the Cops arrested 65 people who they had discovered had DRUGS in their Tents while conducting a "Search and Rescue Operation" When The B-Org changed it's Official policy to Family Friendly, it negatively impacted our Culture and Allowed Law Enforcement to use children attending as an excuse to take away our Freedoms. Both artistically and Physically. Why the fuck do I have to show ID when .001% of the population is under 21? Legally the responsibility should be on the B-Org.Not the Participants. Burning Man is a private event!!!!!! ​ Official Regional Burns Kinda Suck: Let's be honest, it's time that we admit it...None of them feel like Burning Man. Almost every Official Regional is both poorly attended and super expensive for what they actually Offer. It’s just a shitty block party on an asphalt parking lot that locals all hate. In fact, most of them have an insanely long list of rules and restrictions, like 10pm Stop-Times, and Regionals often actually deplete local artists rather than support them. Locals are expected to bring artwork, camps, stages, artcars, etc. For No Cost or on micro-budgets. The tickets to the events are usually super fucking Expensive and if there is somehow profit on the Regional event It gets siphoned off to the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and not to Local Artists who are actually building the regional. The amount of time, effort, and resources that the B-org Spends on the Regionals is a waste. These projects all miss the mark and they don't really support the local community as much as the B-Org thinks. The Truth of the matter is, Year Round there are thousands of vibrant, Fun, and Innovative Burner Community Events World-Wide That are in NO WAY Affiliated the B-Org. All of them seem to do just fine without the BiG B-Org stepping in the way and sucking all of the financial support. THE TRUTH: The Fact of the Matter is this place has always been an uncontrolled Shit-Show full of Freaks, Weirdos, Party Animals, Doosh-Bags, Dooshbaggettes, Bad Artist, Amateur Musicians, Terrible DJs, Annoying Sound Systems, Dusty Burn-gina's, Itchy Burn-Sacks, Wing-Nut-Wrenchers, Tire-Fixers, Shirt-Cockers and Dong-Knockers. Burning Man Thrives when given the least amount of RULES and REGULATIONS. The B-Org keeps taking one-step-forward two-steps-back on everything related to the TRUE CULTURE of Burning Man. They Dragged their feet weeding out Plug-and-Play Camps for Years because of the bribes and kick-backs the B-Org would receive in the form of Donations to the Black Rock Arts Foundation, or by forcing Plug-and-Plays to use exclusively B-Org Vendors, lining pocket books along the way. We, the Actually Burners, are in Control...More so now than Ever! We just need to COMPLAIN to them as much as possible to make change! And when they Drag Their feet or start wasting time and ticket money on anything unrelated the ACTUAL BURNING MAN FESTIVAL we NEED TO CALL THEM OUT! And When they Do stupid shit like the new sound system ordinances WE MUST FIGHT AGAINST IT! The B-Org will destroy our Culture Unless we speak out and TAKE ACTION! This OUR EVENT! We, The Participants, are literally the ones who build and make EVERYTHING! Not the B-Org. We should be the ones who get to direct OUR Culture. NOT THEM. This year more than Ever we Need to Show the B-Org that We Will STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHT TO PARTY! Don't let the B-Org turn Burning Man into a Bribery-Driven Silent-Disco Dicktatorship with Small Scale Art, Alternative Energy Disasters, and Snitch-Camp-Hush-Shamers. This Year We TAKE IT ALL BACK. I'm Zapper Jones. I'll Be Camped at CAMP FUCK-YER-CAMP CAMP. Our motto is ... FUCK YER CAMP! I'll See all you True PARTY ANIMALS drinkin’ at the Dive-Bars, ragin’ on LOUD Artcars and goin’ hard on the Esplanade! BURN ON, YA CRAZY FUCKS!!!! submitted by /u/zapperwippersnapper to r/BurningMan [link] [comments]

** New Updates - OOP posted a new update 13th August which is now included.*\* I am NOT OP. Original post by u/ThrowRAbabydaddyhelp in r/relationship_advice trigger warnings: child abandonment mood spoilers: postive for the future thanks to u/AssumptionOk2753 for suggesting this BORU. Updated version with a new update available here [I (26F) lied about who my baby daddy (26M) is. Do I tell him the truth now? - 30th July 2023 I (26F) grew up in the midwest but went to college in California. There I met and dated Jeff (26M) for our final two years of undergraduate. After graduation I stayed in California to get my master’s degree while Jeff entered the workforce. We were happy together and we planned to get married after I got my master’s. After I finished my schooling Jeff got cold feet about getting married and eventually becoming a father (abandonment issues from his bio dad leaving) so he broke up with me. Heartbroken feels like it would barely scratch the surface on how I felt. I had a great job in California so I stayed in hopes that Jeff would come to his senses and we’d get back together. We never did. He met Grace (25F) and started dating her about 5 months after we broke up. I started planning on moving back to my home state once I realized it was actually over. Then he and Grace broke up at the beginning of this year. Jeff and I ended up sleeping together a few times while they were broken up (it was a very public breakup, no cheating involved). About a week after the last time we had sex he told me that he and Grace were getting back together. He said he couldn’t remain friends with me because he still had feelings for me and he had to let them fade to be fair to Grace. His final words to me were to not call him unless I was literally dying and just wanting to say goodbye. I left California behind three weeks later. Two weeks after I had returned home I found out that I was pregnant. It’s Jeff’s. I wasn’t gonna be that girl that uses a pregnancy to get a man back so I deleted all my social media accounts and made new ones that don’t have my name attached to them. The only Cali people I added were trusted friends who I knew either had no connection to Jeff or who were loyal to me and wouldn’t tell him my new accounts.Early in my pregnancy I made the mistake of checking out Jeff and Grace’s respective profiles and saw that they refer to each other as “loml” and Jeff even had a picture of them captioned saying he was gonna marry that girl. That broke me all over again and I have since blocked them both and decided I had to move on with my life. I’m now 6.5 months pregnant. Since moving back I have bought my own house in my home state and have been busy building a nursery for my baby. I already love this little baby in my belly and I feel 100% confident that I can raise and provide for him on my own with minor help from my family.One of my best friends back in California was having an engagement party. I won’t be able to attend the wedding as I’ll be busy with a newborn when it happens so I decided to fly out to see my friends and offer my congratulations to the couple before my life becomes baby-centric.I got into town on Thursday and honestly had a blast seeing all my friends yesterday even though it’s only been about 6 months since I last saw them. They were all respectful of my wishes not to take pictures of me below the chest. They did post some pictures of me online but from the angles it just looks like I gained some weight in my face. Nothing that would give away my pregnancy. It’s a couple days before my flight back home and the friend that I’m staying with suggested we go to the store because she wanted to get a scrapbook for our engaged friend. So we went to the store and as we were getting ready to leave I saw Jeff’s cousin Tanya (22ish?F) walk in. I’d talked to her several times at Jeff’s family gatherings over the years but we never really got along. She was always a bit too gossipy for me to like her. So of course she was the last person I wanted to see. The first thing she did was loudly announce that I was pregnant as if everyone in the store couldn’t tell just by looking at me. Then she starts grilling me asking if Jeff knows. I said no and that he doesn’t need to know as it’s not his. That was a lie, obviously, but I didn’t want to open a can of worms. Tanya then tells me with how big my belly is that I’m far along and asked how could I move on so quickly. I told her that Jeff and I broke up a long time ago. She responded saying that everyone knows we were still hooking up at the beginning of this year. I did not know that was common knowledge. I figured Jeff would’ve kept his mouth shut about that. Anyway I lied and told her that I already had a new boyfriend and that I was 5 months pregnant. She seemed to accept that and awkwardly congratulated me. My friend and I paid for her stuff and left immediately after that. I prayed that would be the end of it. Like I said, Tanya is a gossip so of course she went and ran her mouth about seeing me pregnant just a few hours later. Now a bunch of my friends have messaged me saying that Jeff is blowing up their inboxes trying to reach me. None of them have told him my new number or social media so he has no way of reaching me himself. My flight back home isn’t for another two days and I’m freaking out. Some of my friends are saying that I should just tell him the truth now that he knows I’m pregnant. I still say I can get by pretending it’s someone else’s and that I’m not far enough along for it to be his. I honestly just want to ignore him and go back home. However I’m having some doubts that that's the right choice and there isn’t a consensus on what to do so I’m turning to internet strangers. TLDR; I got pregnant by my ex. Moved away, planning to raise the child myself. His cousin saw me and told him I'm pregnant. Now he's trying to get ahold of me and I just wanna go home and ignore him. Should I tell him the truth or just go home? Comments Unless you specifically don't want him in your life for your sake, you should tell him the truth. "I need to move on so please don't contact me unless you're on your death bed" also includes "Or it turns out you're pregnant" as an asterisk. I don't want him in my life, but it's not like a safety issue or anything. He was never abusive in any way. I've just moved very far away and I don't plan on coming back so why even start that discussion when there's no positive outcome is where my mind is at, I guess. Because one day your kid might decide they want to get to know their biological father, and then he will find out, and then he will realize that you decided to take away any chance for him to know the kid growing up. Your kid will also realize that you took away any chance for them to know their biological father while growing up. Yes, it's obviously a very difficult situation. He still deserves to know. You can emphasize to him that you're structuring your life based on the assumption that he won't be involved in the kid's life. Obviously that conversation would be years away but I never planned on hiding anything from my child. Idk exactly what I would say but I'd be honest that his father didn't abandon him. I like that last sentence. That's a very good way to phrase it. Thank you for that. He doesn’t sound like a dirtbag. That would be the only reason not to tell him. You both handled the breakup like adults, maybe trust yourselves to do that again. The baby will not be hurt by more love. I think he'd be a great father, but I just don't see how it would realistically work with co-parenting. I'm not renting, I bought a house. My life is back home and his life is here. Although even with that as a legitimate concern maybe I'm just really wanting to avoid having to have the conversation with him. ​ Update: I (26F) lied about who my baby daddy (26M) is. - 2nd August 2023 Hi everyone. So the consensus on my post was to tell Jeff about the baby being his. Even from just the first few comments that seemed clear. We did end up meeting up. It wasn't particularly interesting or dramatic but if anyone cares, here's what happened: He got ahold of the friend I was staying with on Instagram. I wanted to just talk to him on the phone but he insisted we talk in person asap. In retrospect I should’ve just waited until the next day but I kind of just wanted to get it over with and it seemed like he did too. Tbh I thought he was gonna tell me that he wanted nothing to do with the kid because I didn’t see any other reason why he wanted to talk in person right that second. Keep in mind it was almost 10 at night at the time. So my friend and I went to his parents’ house where he was waiting. His parents always treated me like family so I guess I felt comfortable being there even though we probably should've met at a neutral location. When we got there Jeff’s mom answered the door. She hugged me and I could tell she wanted to touch my stomach but she restrained herself and didn’t even ask, thankfully. I always liked her. We made awkward small talk as she led me to the living room. It was clear that they had just had a party as it was still messy with a bunch of drinking cups lying around and confetti on the floor. On the couch was Jeff and Grace holding each other’s hands. I was surprised that I honestly felt nothing for him at first. His stepdad offered me a seat but I chose to stand. I wasn't planning on being there long anyway. Jeff started off saying that I might be able to fool Tanya but he knows there’s no way I would’ve ever met a new guy and gotten pregnant that fast. So he asked why I didn’t tell him. I told him the truth, that the last time we spoke he told me not to contact him unless I was literally dying...and I’m not dying. He told me that he was trying to be respectful to Grace and that obviously this would’ve been an exception. Grace chimed in to tell me that I ruined her proposal. I found out later (third hand info but knowing Tanya I believe it) that the party at his parents house was for him to propose to Grace in front of all their friends and families. Tanya waited until after the proposal and when people were giving speeches she told Jeff she was so glad he got away from me and wasn’t gonna be stuck raising my baby. Then all hell broke loose at the party apparently. I had no idea that happened at the time or I honestly would not have went to see him at all. But hearing that he proposed was when it hurt. He broke up with me cause he was scared of marriage and kids but he dated her not even half as long as we did and she got a ring. I put on a brave face, or at least I think I did, and acted like it didn’t bother me but it absolutely did. His mom told Grace that it’s not my fault and now wasn’t the time for that. Then Jeff told me that “obviously [I] can’t move now.” I told him that I already did and I was only in California for the weekend. He countered saying that I have to move back. I told him no, I’m not doing that. He said well I can’t just leave. At that point I got frustrated and told him that I left months ago. My job is in my home state. I bought a house. All my doctor’s appointments have been there. I established residency there a long time ago. California isn’t my home anymore and hasn’t been for half a year now. So then he got frustrated and got up to approach me asking if he’s just supposed to send a paycheck once a month and saying this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. I don’t really know what he meant by that second part cause he just found out I was pregnant a few hours before, but I assumed he was taking about his life plans? I forced myself to calm down and try to be empathetic. I told him that if he was worried about this screwing up his plans for the future that he had nothing to worry about. I don’t want or need anything from him. I’ve planned everything out from finances to childcare when I return to work to even setting up my baby’s college fund. It’s all taken care of already. He didn’t really say anything. I didn’t know if he was thinking or just relieved that I had it all handled. I told him he can still get married to Grace and have his own family someday. I promised I wouldn’t bother or blame him for anything. My baby will be loved and cared for. Jeff got teary eyed and told me that I know how he feels about this. He was referring to when he broke up with me and said that he didn’t wanna be a dad because he didn’t think he’d be a good one. He also has abandonment issues from his bio dad walking out on him, his siblings, and his mom when he was 6. I told Jeff that he’s not him (his bio dad). That he’s better than him and always will be. His mom started crying at this point I guess from seeing how his dad’s abandonment still affects him to this day. I promised Jeff that I wouldn’t let my baby think that Jeff was a deadbeat. I’d be honest that we just weren’t meant to be together and we live thousands of miles apart. He told me that he can’t just not be in his kid’s life and that I don’t understand what it could do to them. He asked if we could please just figure something out together. I asked him what did he realistically expect would be a solution. Because I’m not moving back to California and I highly doubt he and Grace wanted to pack their bags and move that far away from their own families and friends. I said I’m not gonna be sending my kid on a plane every few months either because that’s too much. Jeff didn’t say anything to that so I told him maybe that could be an option when he’s older and has more independence but right now it’s not happening. Jeff’s eyes lit up and he asked, “It’s a boy?” I’d been careful not to reveal the gender up until then but I messed up there. I nodded and he nervously asked if he could feel the baby. Before I could even respond Grace let out this loud wail and stormed off to the kitchen. Jeff apologized to me and then went to go comfort her. His mom excused herself as well as she was still crying. So she left and her husband followed her. That left me and my friend awkwardly standing alone in the living room. All we hear is his mom sniffling in the hallway and Grace sobbing while talking to Jeff in the kitchen. It was so incredibly uncomfortable. And I know many will hate me for this but I just felt overwhelmed by the whole thing. Maybe it makes me pathetic but having to stand in the room where a party was just held to celebrate Jeff proposing to another woman hurt so damn bad. So I left. I told my friend let’s get the hell out of here and we quietly walked out. We ended up staying in a hotel and I was able to get an earlier flight home on Sunday. Now I’m back home and putting my focus back on the nursery. I told my friends that I had talked to Jeff and I apologized if he still tried to reach me through them. I advised them to block him if it’s too much. I know this isn’t the end of things. I’m planning on reaching out to him again eventually. Even if he broke my heart I still care about him and I won’t deny him a relationship with his kid if that’s what he really wants. I have no idea how it’s gonna work and I’m only allowed to update once so I apologize that I won’t be able to tell anyone who cares how it all turns out. Thank you for the advice on my last post. Even though everyone was downvoting me and the post itself it was nice to get opinions without bias. Comments I think you did your best. It’s all any good parent can do. You were dealt a bad hand but your son is lucky to have you as his mother. Update 2 - 13th August 2023 I’m a little surprised to be writing this. I thought my update post was one and done but I guess it got reposted on another sub yesterday and gained traction there so a bunch of people have requested another update. I wasn't aware that people could make posts on their own profile either so I feel dumb for thinking that I could only update once, but here we are. I greatly appreciate the newer comments supporting me. The few comments I got from the relationship advice sub were all in support of Jeff and downvoting everything I commented. I felt like I was crowned the queen of Hell over there tbh. I haven't replied to any of the new comments because while most of you just read about the incident yesterday, for me it was 2 weeks ago. My hormones are all over the place due to my pregnancy but thankfully I'm past the headspace I was in that day and when I first returned home. I do appreciate all the well wishes for me and my baby though! Before I give an update I wanted to clear a few things up. First, I’ve seen a lot of comments saying that Jeff proposed to Grace within a few months after they started dating. That’s not true. Aside from the one month break up where Jeff and I conceived the baby they were together roughly a year and a half before the engagement (assuming they had no more break ups after. Idk their full history nor do I care to). Second, I feel like people were being a bit harsh on Jeff. I can honestly say he is not an abusive or controlling person. The man never so much as raised his voice at me in the four years we dated. He was a bit overbearing by demanding that I had to stay in California because that’s where he is, but he just found out about the baby and was panicking that I'd disappear and he wouldn't be able to contact me. Which to be fair, that's exactly what I did so I get it. I had a million thoughts, some wildly ridiculous when I think about it now, running through my own head when I found out too. Third, he wasn’t juggling Grace and I at the same time like people think. She broke up with him; they both thought for good at the time. He and I started having sex again but it wasn’t like we were in a sequel of the lovey dovey honeymoon phase. It was a weird and confusing time. We weren’t talking about getting back together. I already had a start date for my new job back home and my move was scheduled (he didn’t know any of that). I was still in love with him of course and I hoped he’d tell me he wanted to get back together and I would've stayed but he didn’t. Finding out he was getting back with Grace hurt but I can’t say I felt used for sex. I don’t think either of us knew what the hell we were doing by sleeping together again in the first place. Jeff is a simple man overall. I promise he’s not some supervillain taking advantage of women and playing with their emotions. I'm not making excuses for him. I wish it were that easy to say that he's a dirtbag and you should give me all your sympathy. In reality I know who Jeff is as a person, anyone who read my posts knows him as just a collection of bad and/or questionable choices he made. If you summarize anyone up to just the bad shit they've done of course they'd come off as an unlikable person. Jeff's not evil or manipulative. He's just got some stuff he probably should’ve worked through years ago and admittedly I never thought his issues were that prevalent until we broke up. Plus I’m positive that Grace knew we slept together while they were broken up. There’s no way that was a shock to her. He would’ve told her himself and even if he somehow hadn’t, if Tanya knew then everyone else knew shortly after. Guaranteed. Lastly, I appreciate everyone concerned about any custody issues that may arise from this. I was also amused by the people who were hyping themselves up thinking that I was delusional and actually gonna be forced to put my baby on a plane by court order. I’m not sure why so many people on Reddit are used to dysfunctional relationships where judges and a huge custody battle need to be involved, but that’s not us. Jeff and I were together and very much in love for years. It might be hard to picture that when you’ve only read about the shitty end of our relationship but everything before the break up was an ideal relationship which is exactly why it hurt me so much when he ended it. Things are weird now but we don’t hate each other. Our default option, even in a complicated situation like this, is not “We’re taking this to court!” That would be the last resort. I’m sure we’ll work it out between ourselves long before it ever gets there. So on to the actual update... I planned on contacting Jeff after a couple weeks. I wanted to take time to gather my own thoughts and figure out what I wanted to say. Instead, I got phone calls from his number about a week after I returned home. He left a voicemail asking me to call him so we could talk. I was honestly furious because there’s no way he should’ve been able to find my number unless somebody told him. It might not seem like it’s a big deal but to me I saw it as there being somebody who betrayed my trust in them. I texted him asking how he got my number. He said it wasn’t important and that he wanted to talk. I said it is important to me but he still didn’t wanna tell me. I told him we can talk when he tells me who he got my number from. So finally he told me who it was and sent a screenshot of the conversation when I asked for proof. It was the second least likely friend I would have expected to break my trust. That’s a whole other story though. So we talked over FaceTime and he told me that he absolutely wants to be in our son’s life. He doesn’t know how it’s gonna work long term and neither do I. There was no threat of lawyers or his mom shouting “grandparent’s rights” in the background like people were expecting. We’re adults and we’ll figure it out. The situation is not any easier to handle logistically, but emotions from that night have died down and we have clearer heads to move forward with. He did however have the audacity to tell me that he hates that I didn't tell him much sooner and that I wasn't planning to tell him at all until Tanya found out because he "thought we meant more to each other than that." I told him I thought we did to until he told me not to contact him unless I was dying. That shut him up quickly because he knows now that it was an extreme and unnecessary thing to say even if he wanted to cut contact with me. He's apologized for it and I apologized for not telling him about the baby myself. That's all we can really do. We're about to co-parent a child together so we don't get the luxury of holding a grudge with one another over past slights. He also told me that he and Grace are no longer together. He claims that it was a mutual decision but that sounds too easy to me. How do you go from newly engaged to broken up in 18 hours with it being a completely clean process? I’m guessing he’s just sparing me the ugly details on what must have actually happened. I do feel bad for Grace. Other than incorrectly assigning blame for her ruined engagement party she didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know her personally but her proposal night should’ve been one of the best nights of her life and it was ruined. I wouldn’t want that for any woman. And because I know what everyone is gonna say, no I am not seeing this as an opportunity to get back together with Jeff. Honestly my focus is on my son right now. I’m not thinking about jumping into a relationship with anyone, much less the man who broke my heart once already. I think Jeff and I need to figure out how we’re gonna co-parent first and foremost. And tbh I want a man who loves me and chooses me for the person that I am, not because I happen to have given birth to his child. Plus I don't know that I could ever get over that he proposed to Grace over me. Even if they broke off their engagement I still wanna know why she got a ring and I didn't. And I am going to ask eventually, but I don't think any answer will ever make it okay to me. A lot of people said it wasn't that he didn't want marriage, he just didn't want it with me. I find that hard to believe because as I said above we really had an ideal relationship. Our breakup wasn't a buildup of issues. It really was as simple as "You want marriage and kids, I don't" which I think most would agree is just the natural end of a relationship. If it really is as simple as I just wasn't the one then I want him to look me in the eyes and tell me that himself. Jeff is a terrible liar even when he's lying for a good reason like a special surprise. He fidgets his fingers and can't maintain eye contact when he's lying. So if he looks me in the eyes and tells me his reason for why he chose to marry her and not me, I'll know if he's being honest. Jeff also told me that his mom wanted to send me stuff for the baby so he asked for my address. I declined. I’m positive that there are no nefarious reasons and she’s just excited and wants to help. This will be her first grandchild. However I still felt a little uncomfortable giving them my home address. He’s been texting me every day and calls me every night to say goodnight. Sometimes he wants to “talk” to the baby. It’s a bit confusing for me because he broke up with me because he didn’t want a kid but now he wants to be involved to the point where he’s going out of his way to contact me and ask if I need anything. It’s strange and I don’t really understand how his brain works but like I said in my last post I won’t deny him a relationship with his kid if he wants one. Jeff wants to visit me in person to talk properly, but I told him I’m not sure if that’s necessary right now. He asked to come last weekend and I said no. Then he asked again about possibly coming this weekend but I told him I can’t because I’m having my baby shower on Saturday. He wants to come. I’m not sure if that’s a great idea. I’m not worried that he would say or do anything bad and we're getting along over text/vc. I can tell that he just wants to be involved but part of me feels like it’s sort of... idk “playing house” almost? I guess it wouldn’t be a big deal if I made it clear he would be here as a friend and the father of the baby but not as anything more. My parents don’t think it’s a good idea but I know that’s just because they don’t like Jeff ever since he broke up with me. My sister who is more level-headed says that it could be a show of good faith that I’m serious about having a healthy co-parenting relationship and it’ll probably be easier to build that foundation now before the baby comes. My brothers don’t care either way but they say they’re ready to beat up Jeff if he does or says anything stupid. (He won’t, but I love my brothers for always looking out for me) I’m not sure what I’m going to decide but I know Jeff needs an answer soon so he can book a flight and a hotel room if I do say yes. I’m open to suggestions. Comments I think this is a decision you need to make from your heart. Traditionally baby showers are for the mother. It is not uncommon for fathers to not be at the event even when the couple is together. I think what it really comes down to is, it’s YOUR day, you are carrying this baby, if you feel that him being there in any way would lessen your enjoyment of the day then he doesn’t get to be there. I actually wouldn't mind if he was there. As long as he understood that I'm not gonna be metaphorically holding his hand and introducing him to everyone as he'd be the odd man out at a party full of my family and friends. I think my issue is the talk. He's gonna want to have a serious talk if he comes here, and like I said I have things I want to know too. But I don't want that to overshadow my baby shower. If he was willing to put that talk aside until after the shower I think I'd be fine with coming. ​ You need to get yourself a therapist so that you have a clear-headed and impartial person that can give you good advice. From experience, I can tell you pregnancy hormones can exacerbate emotions and everyone else is emotionally invested as well, so a neutral party will benefit you. I don't disagree with you at all. Last month I cried because I thought the weather was gonna be perfect one day and it ended up being two degrees higher than predicted which made me feel like the whole day was ruined. So believe me, I know all about the pregnancy hormones throwing off my equilibrium. It sucks cause a lot of women were telling me that my hormones would only be out of sorts for the first trimester when my body was adjusting to the pregnancy but for me its been on and off all throughout my pregnancy. ​ I think you are still hurt by Jeff, that's why you don't let him come to visit you. Don't push him, he really wants to be part of his baby life, you are demotivating him. Baby is not only yours, Jeff is not the same person that told you he doesn't want kids, he CHANGE and for good. You are entitled to your question (why no me?) But don't mix things. One thing is your personal relationship with him as former partners and other is the relationship as parents...the baby is not here yet but the bond could be built from before the birth it self. Can a man change that quickly though? Some people were saying that men do actually change their mind once it becomes a reality but that just seems really fast. I mean granted I didn't talk to him for 6 months and he did propose to someone so I guess he could've changed his beliefs regarding marriage and children. I am trying to separate the feelings though. Honestly when he and I talk it just feels like talking to a friend. If he had been talking to me the way he does now 6 months ago I probably would've been fantasizing about us reconciling but that's not the case. I just wanna do what's right for my son now. ​ I had a feeling Grace wasn't going to stick around honestly. Like others have said, this is more up to you, this is going to be your kid and your baby shower. You obviously want the people who love and care about you around, and to feel comfortable. You probably will feel pretty awkward having Jeff there, and others might find it uncomfortable too. I'd keep the party small with those who you want to be there. I agree with your sister though about maybe setting a base ground on co-parenting before the baby comes along, maybe with a secondary party if you feel uncomfortable meeting him alone. I get a small feeling he's going to try to weasel his way back in though, try to get back with you and become that happy family he never got to have. What would you do OP, if he confesses his love for you, wants back with you and tells you he regrets everything? What would you say because I feel like this will certainly be a possibility. If he did it right this second? I would tell him no. He left me and proposed to the next woman he dated. That was a gut punch. I'm not saying I would never get back with him, but it would largely depend on what his reason for why he proposed to Grace and not me. If it was just that he thought she was prettier or she made him happier or something that boiled down to "I saw it being possible with her" then I would never get back with him because that means I was his second choice and he only got back with me for our son's sake and not because he actually loved me more than her. I honestly can't think of a reason he could say that would make me feel better about it though. Not only that but it would take time. He needs to prove that he's serious about co-parenting and that he's not just gonna give up or decide that he was right the first time and he doesn't wanna be a dad. I genuinely don't think he would ever abandon his son because he knows that pain himself, but I can't say for sure that he won't until he proves it. Yeah, the first thing I told him was that if I decided he could come then he would need to get a hotel because I'm not letting him stay at my house. Not even in my guest room. That's just too close for where we are right now. ​ Originally flaired as inconclusive, as the OOP was not going to post more, but I think it would probably be better marked as ongoing now that she got more positive support from her posts. Reminder - I am not the original poster - Do not harass or brigade the OOP. submitted by /u/Stephenallen1977 to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

I am not the OP. Original post is by u/throwalllthewayawayy in r/TrueOffMyChest TW: Mentions of past abuse, grooming, very creepy behavior towards a child, and pedophilia (per the third update) Mood Spoiler: Extremely concerning and disturbing, but hopeful for OOP and her son ~~~ Original (Recovered with Unddit) - Mar. 14, 2023 I think my sister’s boyfriend (M44) is infatuated with my son (M13). Throwaway since my sister's boyfriend is an avid Reddit user. This might be a long one, so bear with me. I (F38) am a single mother living on a waitress salary. Times are tough right now, and due to unforeseen circumstances, I’ve had to move in with my sister for the past couple months. It’s not an ideal situation, but I’m doing my best. I have an ex husband (M40) who is emotionally abusive, hence the divorce. We share custody of my incredible son (let’s call him Roman, 13) who has been so understanding of our financial situation, even at his age. I love him more than I love myself. He is kind and intelligent. He stole my ex-husband’s face (unfortunately), so he’s beautiful. Every mama will say their son is beautiful, but my kid really is stunningly gorgeous. The amount of adults my age and older who have given him the creepy and unwarranted “He’s going to be a heartbreaker in a few years” comments would alarm you. He has ADHD, but maintains decent grades. He plays a sport and is good at it. He’s got lots of friends who he visits often, and vice versa. Despite the changes in our living situation, he is thriving, and I’d do anything to keep that up. My sister (let’s call her Sarah, 42) and her boyfriend (let’s call him David, 44) are well off and live in a massive house. My sister was happy to take me in, but her boyfriend David…not so much — which I completely understand. I offered to pay rent, but my sister won’t have any of it, so I do chores around the house and cook as often as my work schedule will let me. I never saw much of David anyway — he was often at the bar with his friends, or working, or locked in his room playing video games. When we did see each other, he acted like I didn't exist. My son Roman was staying with his dad for a while as I was figuring things out, and I was worried about David’s attitude once my son moved in with us. I talked to David and promised him that Roman would be respectful and well-behaved, but he was weird about it and shrugged me off. Then David met Roman. David is absolutely fascinated with my kid. His disposition changed so quickly that it gave me whiplash. Suddenly, he stopped locking himself in his room and has decided to spend time with us…well, mostly my son. He helps Roman with his homework. He watches all of Roman’s favorite shows so that they can talk about them together. He buys him food and gifts. My sister Sarah is over-the-moon; she’s been telling me about how us moving in has been the best thing for their relationship, because David is happier now. I thought it was sweet at first. But in the back of my head, I think something more nefarious could be going on. To paint a clearer picture, I’ve noted some other changes I’ve noticed that I can’t decide whether they’re innocent or not. David texts my son often, which wouldn’t be weird, except he does it while he’s at school. The texts themselves aren’t weird at all, but David lightly scolds him for not replying sometimes. Before my son moved in, David was rarely ever home during the afternoon/evenings. He’d stay out after work and go drinking with his buddies until late in the night, a habit he’s had for years, according to my sister. Now, he’s home ALL THE TIME. He gets home before Roman gets off the bus (around 3:15pm if he's not at practice) and stays home all day, even offering to “babysit” while I’m working through the evening. He still drinks, just in the house. Last Wednesday, I woke up to use the bathroom during the middle of the night. To get to the bathroom, you have to pass by my son’s room. I was surprised to see that the door was closed all the way, since Roman always likes it open because his room gets hot at night. Also, he has been staying up late texting his friends lately, which has caused him to sleep through his alarm and miss the bus some days. So that night, I opened the door to let the air in and make sure he was asleep, and there was David. Standing by Roman’s bed. In the dark. He stated that he was looking for his cellphone, but I saw him jump with anxiety when I opened the door. He left quickly, muttering something about how it might be in the kitchen. Why would his phone be in my son’s room? And why was the door closed? David offers to drive my son everywhere he needs to go. Only him. School (if he misses the bus), practice, his friends’ houses. This is the same man who wouldn’t lift a finger for me until my son moved in. It’s been incredibly helpful since I’m not home often, but a part of me wonders if he’s doing it for the wrong reasons. I caught David doing Roman’s laundry, resulting in a few articles of clothing going missing. This one irritated me because I make my son do his own laundry. I asked him not do this, but his excuse is that he is trying to save water. I don’t know how to fight him on this, since it’s his house. I am terrified to bring this up to my sister. Am I reading into things too much? Am I silly for worrying that he might have ulterior motives? If I tell my sister and she gets angry and there’s nothing going on, she’ll kick us out and we’ll be homeless… ~~~ First Update - Mar. 15, 2023 Update: I think my sister’s boyfriend (M44) is infatuated with my son (M13). Hi all. First, i want to thank you all for your responses and suggestions. I am so overwhelmed by the replies and was unable to read them all, but I'm glad (and terrified) to see that I'm not going crazy, that there is something wrong. I also want to thank those who shared their experiences with being groomed/sexually assaulted, as it opened my eyes to a lot of things. Second, I'd like to clarify a few things. I did not let my child in David's car after the bedroom incident. I would never do that. After this occurrence, tied with the laundry situation, I began to take note of David's behavior, which was when I started putting the pieces together. I came to Reddit shortly after…and here we are, unfortunately. Third, I'd like to address a couple questions I've seen. David is not on any sex offender registry. By "saving water", David meant that he combines loads of laundry, meaning that he'll do his laundry AND Roman's laundry in the same load. The laundry that I've seen go missing are mostly socks, which is typical, even when Roman was doing his own laundry. But then, Roman told me that he was missing a couple shirts and a pair of underwear. That alarmed me, since this only happened once David started doing his laundry. Massive red flag. The texts between really are innocent — David asking him what he wants for dinner, what time he should pick him up, discussing shows they've been watching. But based on his other behavior, it's clearly a grooming tactic and I’ll be sure that it stops immediately. No way in hell should he be texting my kid at school. The bedroom situation, in clearer detail. I peeked in to make sure that Roman was asleep, and David was at the foot of his bed. The room was of course pitch black, and I was groggy as hell, so I didn't even register that it was him until he pushed past me to leave. I checked on my son afterwards. He was still asleep, and the blankets were fully over him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but maybe I'd just intervened at the right moment. I made sure his door was open, and I left my door open as well so I could listen for any footsteps. I could not sleep after that happened. It wasn’t sitting right with me. None of these are excuses. Like I said, eyes are wide open now. Fourth, I'll discuss everything with my son tonight once I get off work. A lot of you said it was a good idea, and I was already planning on doing it. He has not been acting strange in any way and is his usual happy self, but that doesn't mean that David hasn't done anything yet. That reality is terrifying to me and I pray that's not the case. I pretty much have a clear idea on what to say to him, but I am not sure if I should explicitly tell him that I found David in his room, or that he might be stealing his clothing. Any suggestions on how to go about this conversation are welcome. Fifth, I fully plan to confront David and talk to my sister Sarah about this. I am not a doormat, and I will do anything to keep my son safe. David is on a church retreat and thankfully has not been home for a few days. I've decided to speak with my sister first, in case David twists my words or manipulates her into believing that nothing is wrong. And once he returns, I'll confront him based on how my sister reacts. Any other suggestions on how to go about it are welcome as well. Sixth, I've read your suggestions about setting up cameras, checking for cameras, drug testing my son, and finding his missing articles of clothing. I plan on buying cameras and drug testing him once we have a conversation. I did look for cameras and found nothing, but I’ll look again. I am terrified of what I might see if I end up finding Roman’s missing clothing, but I know it’s just a reality that I have to face…that people can be so disgustingly vile to a child. Lastly, I know I need to get out of this house. I know that. I'm working on it. If I could pack everything up tonight and do it, I would. I’d send him to live with my ex husband, but he’s abusive toward my son and me (more so toward me, but still). I’ve considered your suggestions about looking into homeless shelters, and I’m leaning toward making arrangements for that after I confront David. I'm a good mom, but I know I'm not the best mom. This past week has been hell. I should've intervened earlier. I regret that. Thank you for listening. I'll update once I follow through with my plans. ~~~ Second Update - Mar. 19, 2023 Update 2: I think my sister's boyfriend (M44) is infatuated with my son (M13). Hi all, this is my second update. My first post got removed, but you can find it. Apparently, it made its way to TikTok and Instagram, which I’m not sure how to feel about, but it’s too late to take back now. In the past four days, I spoke with my sister Sarah, her boyfriend David, and my son Roman, all separately. One went well, two didn’t. I have a lot to get off my chest, so this might be long. There’s a TLDR at the bottom. My first conversation was with my son, which occurred the night I posted my first update. In fear of this post getting removed like my first one, I’ll have to censor myself, but I think you’ll understand what I’m referring to when I say that I asked my son the serious and explicit questions. Roman adamantly denied that David ever did anything to him. He seemed surprised that I asked. He said he would’ve told me if he had. I believe him. I know he could be lying, but I’m trying to take his word for it. My son and I have a very open and transparent relationship. The first time my ex husband ever verbally abused him, he came straight to me and told me about it. My guard is up, but I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Like you all advised me, I didn’t bring up the bedroom or laundry situation. But I was honest with him and told him that David’s behavior toward him was inappropriate. We had a talk about boundaries, saying no, consent, etc. I drilled into him that David is not to drive him anywhere, text him anymore, and be around him alone under any circumstances. I also explained what grooming is, and that it’s what David has been doing to him. He said he knew about it through a school assembly. Then, he said something that broke my heart. He apologized for letting David treat him that way, that he “shouldn’t have fell for it” (his exact words). I assured him that none of it was his fault. I want to make it clear that David is not preying on him because of how he looks or how he acts, he is doing it because he is a predator and they prey on the vulnerable. Honestly, I could tell that the conversation had left him a little shell-shocked. To know that the person you liked and trusted isn’t who you thought he was would leave any kid rattled. For the entire rest of the night, he followed me around like a lost puppy. It did break my heart a little, to see him like that, but I don’t want him to feel a false sense of security around David, so I have no regrets about it. Sarah was next. I knew it would turn into an argument before the conversation even began. It’s always been that way with her. My sister is nice, but not kind. She’ll take you in off the street, but then throw it back in your face if you cross her. So I knew what I was getting into, but I had to do it not only for my kid’s sake, but for hers. This is not a man I want her to be with, have children with, nor do I want him in our family. I told her that I was uncomfortable with the way David acts around Roman, and that I think it’s a lot deeper than what he portrays it to be. I mentioned that I didn’t like the gift giving and the constant texting, and I brought up the bedroom and laundry incidents. Like I predicted, she was more offended that I was accusing her boyfriend of grooming my son. She didn’t see how that was proof of anything. “Do you know how many socks and pairs of underwear I’ve lost while doing laundry? It’s probably stuck somewhere in the dryer.” The more I expressed my concerns, the more defensive she got. She thinks I’m…manic, essentially. She said that as soon as things get good for me (roof over my head, food in the fridge, a steady job) I intentionally screw it up because deep down I don’t think I deserve happiness. That she tries to help me every time, but I end up stabbing her in the back, like I am right now. So, she doesn’t believe me. That’s her prerogative, fine. I told her that I won’t be staying at her house much longer, and that I don’t want David around my kid anymore, that we’ll be keeping to ourselves for the rest of my short time here. She’s letting me stay, surprisingly, but she said she’s glad to see me go. She swore up and down that David would never hurt Roman, and that she was sad to see their relationship ruined over an accusation with no real basis. That I shouldn’t let my self destructive behavior and my “bipolar paranoia” get in the way of other people’s happiness. And that I better not accuse her boyfriend of being a predator anymore. Essentially, she kept shifting the blame onto me, so I ended it there. Oh, and she told me that she wants reimbursement for things like clothing and grocery shopping, because apparently we are draining her wallet with buying so much food (Yes, an eighth grader going through a growth spurt eats a lot. Shocker!). But I apologized and said I’d buy his and my groceries from now on. David came back from his church retreat Friday morning, which is when I confronted him. I was very upset, so I didn’t go easy on him. He was thrown off by my hostility, but once he understood what I was implying, his demeanor shifted. “Sit down, sit down, let’s talk about it,” he kept saying, except he was the one who was nervous and looked like he was on the brink of a panic attack. I kept my composure. I asked him why he was in my son’s room in the middle of the night with the door shut. He gave me the same excuse, that he was looking for his cellphone. I asked him why he couldn’t have gone for it in the morning. He said that he set the alarm to 5am for work, and that he didn’t want it to go off with my son in the room and wake him up. I asked him why he was standing over my son’s bed. He admitted that he was trying to wake him up and ask him if he’d seen his phone. Did he not just say that he didn’t want the alarm to wake him up? I asked him what on Earth would compel him to think it is okay to wake up my child in the middle of the night to help him look for a cellphone. He said he wasn’t thinking straight, and that he was sorry. I asked him about the missing laundry as well. He adamantly denied what I was implying. He said that his and my sister’s clothing get lost in the laundry all the time. That he would help me find my son’s missing clothing. All while apologizing profusely. I’ll admit, I was thrown off by how apologetic he was, and it made me a little soft. I thanked him for letting us stay in his house, and I apologized for not setting boundaries earlier, but I told him that from now on, I didn’t feel comfortable with him being around my son. No more driving him places, buying him gifts, texting him, helping him with homework, doing his laundry, etc. I essentially told him that he is no longer allowed to be alone with my son or touch his things under any circumstances. He broke down in tears. He was hysterical. The thought of me believing that he is preying on my son made him miserable. That he’d never do that. He said, “I love him like a father loves a son.” When reading my original post, a lot of you believed the same thing at first. So did I. But I just…don’t like the way David looks at him. Yes, I see the kindness in his eyes toward my son as he helps him with homework or watches a show with him, but there is a nuance of something covetous and sinister that I can’t shake off. Anyway, I told him that it’s unhealthy for him to be so fixated on a child, and that he cannot depend on my kid for happiness. I told him that we’d be leaving very soon (more on that later). I didn’t tell him where or when it was happening. He asked if there was anything he could do to rectify the situation. He suggested that the four of us sit down and talk about it. I declined. I reiterated that he is not allowed near my kid anymore and left it at that. A small part of me feels like I was too harsh on him overall. Maybe he was just looking for his phone. Maybe it’s a coincidence that articles of clothing are missing. But he was on his knees, sobbing, like I had just pulled the rug out from underneath him. For a child he hasn’t known for that long. I don’t think he was devastated that I’d accused him of being a predator, he was devastated that I revoked his access to my child. I’m not stupid. I once witnessed this man argue with my sister — brutal, verbal assaults from both sides, which ended in my sister crying. He didn’t shed a tear. For my peace of mind (and yours), I have been watching Roman like a hawk. When I’m home, he’s with me. When I’m not home, he’s at a trusted friend’s house, or again, with me. I actually took him to work with me this morning, which he wasn’t thrilled about, but whatever. I made him block David’s number, of course. We haven’t been in the house since Friday, but as some of you suggested, I will sleep in his room at night instead of making him sleep in my room. I’ll be honest, I decided to hold off on drug testing him, because I really do not think David has been drugging him. My son is naturally a heavy sleeper and has always had issues waking up for school, even before we moved into my sister’s house. I checked his text messages, and from what I’ve seen, he’s never texted David at night. He’s usually up texting his friends in a group chat. Like you all suggested, I purchased a nanny cam, specifically the one where you can watch the footage on your smartphone. I wasn’t expecting it to be so pricy…I ordered them on Wednesday, and they are due to arrive tonight or Monday morning. I’ll put it in my son’s room and review it every day. I’m really nervous because there’s a possibility that I’ll see something odious and I don’t know if I can handle that. Lots of you have voiced your concerns for my kid. From what I’ve seen and from what he’s told me, he’s doing fine! We have been staying at a motel for the weekend, now that David has returned from his church retreat. I wasn’t taking any chances. $56 a night, and a little sketchy, but I don’t want to complain. Again, despite the situation, his mood has been a lot better than mine has. He thinks a motel is the same as a hotel, so to him, it’s like we’re on a mini vacation. It’s mind-blowing how kids can be so resilient, even in the most unnerving situations. The majority of you have told me to go to a women’s shelter. I looked into this, and while it’s an option, the closest one to where I live is more than an hour away. I don’t have a car. I can take the bus — my usual mode of transportation — but that disrupts his commute to school, and my commute to work. It’s still winter and freezing cold where I live, so I’d rather watch him like a hawk than live on the street and subject him to the cold weather. And I am not taking him back to my ex husband’s house. There’s a reason why he left, and why I divorced him. Which brings me to some good news. I applied for public housing a loooong while back and I am in the process of getting approved! They contacted me for documentation (which I submitted) and I got "verified” so I think that’s a good sign? I’m very fortunate, since I know waitlists can be long sometimes. I can’t believe I’m holding it together so well, but I’m proud of myself. I think I’m doing everything I can. Thank you for listening. I’ll update again shortly with hopefully better news. TLDR; currently at motel after confronting sister and her boyfriend. Reactions were brutal. Son is safe and nothing bad has happened to him. Camera has been purchased and will be set up and reviewed daily once I return, and a deep search of David’s room will be conducted once I get the opportunity. Currently getting approved for public housing, which will be my ticket out. Edit: This goes without saying, but I will of course talk to my son before putting a camera in his room. ~~~ ***IMPORTANT EDIT:**\* OOP has posted a new update since I made this post. I got permission from the mods of this sub to add it here, so I'll post it below. Be warned, it is very disturbing. Third Update - Mar. 26, 2023 Update 3: I think my sister's boyfriend (M44) is infatuated with my son (M13). Hi, all, this is my third update. Another long one, so TLDR at the bottom. I have both bad news and good (really good!) news. Due to the bad news, I'm not mentally doing the best right now, so I’m sorry if this is scrambled, because I don’t really know where to start. I’m angry, hurt, disgusted, and as all of my emotions begin to pile upon each other, I’m beginning to spiral a bit. And before anyone begins to worry, I’ll put it out there now that my son is doing okay. I guess I’ll start off by saying that my son and I weren’t in the house much, up until Friday of this week. We’d been staying at a local motel that’s decently close to his school and where I work. I am a waitress at a restaurant, and my manager knows I’m dealing with housing issues, so he’s been a bit understanding with me when I call out. But when you don’t work, you don’t get paid — and between the Lyfts, takeouts, and motel costs, my wallet isn’t doing so great, but I’m 100% making it work, and I have no regrets. But since we weren’t at the house, things sort of escalated a bit. David’s number is blocked on Roman’s phone, but he found him on TikTok and Instagram on Monday night and messaged him there. Nothing explicit in the messages, just things like: Did you block my number? I really miss talking to you, is everything okay? Maybe in the future, we can talk to each other again. I’m sorry if I upset you or your mom. Are you and your mom safe? Where are you staying? Respond to me when you get a moment. I have something important to tell you. And many more like that, just him begging my son for a conversation. I was livid when my son showed me. I think what set me off the most is that I know David messaged him because he thought my kid would respond without telling me. He thinks they have some secret, private relationship right under my nose that I’m interfering with. I’m pretty sure that’s why he hasn't kicked me out of his house. He's not mad, just miserable and desperate for some sort of contact. I feel like no matter how hard I pull my son away from David, he’s refusing to let go. We blocked the Instagram and TikTok accounts immediately, and I screenshotted the messages (I'm trying to keep a record of everything). I asked Roman to delete his Snapchat account, just in case, but he didn't want to do that (I’m 99% sure he has a girl on there that he likes). I let that slide because he came straight to me about the other accounts, and he agreed not to add any new accounts on Snapchat or post anything that gave away our location for the time being. This entire ordeal upset my son. He broke down in tears when he came back from school the next day. That hurt a lot to see. I don't know if I expressed this, but Roman genuinely liked David, and they got along well. Maybe my kid saw him as a father figure, since he was shunned and neglected by my ex-husband. I think I underestimated the mental toll it would take on him from having to cut David off completely, and then block him when he reached out privately. Someone noted that I should get him into therapy soon. I plan on doing that once we are securely living on our own and I find the money for it. It's definitely a priority. David’s harassment spilled over to me, too. He called me multiple times and texted me things like: Let me know when you’re back so we can resolve this. Am I allowed to attend Roman's baseball game on Thursday with you? I'd like to support him. Can you please answer? I'd really love to talk, just us. I'm sorry if I gave you both the wrong impression. I didn’t block his number on my phone. I figured that the more he talked, the more likely he’d continue to incriminate himself and I could use his words against him. I didn't answer a single one of his questions, but I let him know that if he contacted my kid ever again or if he showed up to his school or any events that I'd go straight to the police. And that’s not an empty threat, either. Unbeknownst to him, I am getting the police involved because I now have solid evidence that this man has a sick obsession with my child. This is the bad news, and I’ll forewarn you that if you’re easily triggered, please don’t read any further (or at least skip this and the next two paragraphs). I want to thank you all for confirming my suspicions in the first post, because I found something heinous. I mentioned that I planned to set up a camera in Roman’s room. I asked for his permission first, and he said he didn’t care since we’re barely in the house anymore. The camera I chose is motion sensitive and links the footage to my iPhone, so I can watch it anywhere. The camera was set up on Sunday night as soon as I received the package, and I hid it above the doorframe, so that it overlooked the entire room. You can’t see it unless you use a ladder. I didn't get anything for a couple days; I was randomly notified of movement in the room, but saw nothing when I looked at the footage. But on Wednesday evening, at around six, David came into my son’s room, stood there for a moment, and then left — no longer than a minute. An hour-ish later, he returned and started going through his drawers. He picked up a specific garment and left within less than two minutes. I wanted to throw up. I didn’t sleep that entire night at the motel. The following day, I had someone cover my shift, which gave me the opportunity to do a deep search of David’s room while he was at work and my son was at school. I found the article of clothing inside of his pillowcase, on top of the pillow, right where he would lay his head to rest at night. I was so sick to my stomach that it took me almost two hours to confiscate that article of clothing and check it for evidence. I won’t elaborate, but you can infer what I mean. I was nauseated the entire time. All I could do was put on gloves, throw it into a ziplock bag, and shove it into my closet. I didn’t want to look at it or even think about it. I still don’t. That answers the question of why David was so insistent on doing my kid’s laundry. Who knows how long this has been going on? I've been ruminating on the next steps to take. Besides my main priority — going to the police — my other priority is telling my sister Sarah. We are obviously not on the best terms right now. She found out that I confronted her boyfriend last week, and she is livid. How dare I accuse him of grooming my son. Apparently, he’s not the same man he was after we left, and returned to his old habits. He was back to going to bars with his friends every evening. His drinking got worse. He had stopped coming home early from work and dragged himself through the door at almost midnight — if he even bothered coming home, that is. And he was no longer affectionate toward her. Apparently, it’s my fault he’s depressed again. If those aren't red flags, I don't know what is. I can't tell if she is in denial, or if she can't actually see them. But what she's most concerned about is that David hasn't been home since Thursday. He went to work, came home briefly, then left again without telling her when he’d be back. In my head, that makes sense; he knows that either she or I took the garment that was inside of his pillowcase, and now he’s afraid to come home. It confirms all of my suspicions. I will tell my sister everything, though, probably tonight or tomorrow. I have no idea how to go about it, and I guess I'm nervous about her reaction. She's still convinced that I’m having a manic episode. I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 many years ago, and I take medication to manage it. If I go off of my meds, my mania will progressively get worse until I spiral into psychosis. So her concerns are valid (I put her through a lot back when I wasn’t stable) but that's not the current case for me right now. I have tangible proof and video proof of her boyfriend being a creep. I can bring up the camera footage, but then I have the issue of not getting either of their consent to put a camera in their house, and I don’t know how well that would go over with her, even if it was for a good reason. I just know that if I were in her shoes, I would be grateful that my boyfriend — potential fiancé — was outed as a predator before I got engaged to him. She’s pretty much past the age of having children, but has plans to adopt in the distant future…so I have to tell her, somehow. My son and I have been back in the house since Friday night. My sister still isn’t kicking me out, but she doesn’t want me here anymore. She’s made that very clear. The only reason why I haven't packed our things and left is because, again, David is gone. He won't tell anyone his whereabouts and has turned off his location on his phone, according to my sister. She thinks he might be crashing on a friend’s couch — something he’s done multiple times in the past. I think he knows I’m onto him. But his absence means that I can stay at the house for now. I’m still watching my kid like a hawk and staying hyper vigilant. Still sleeping in his room, taking him to work with me, etc. I can live with the hostility from my sister as long as he is safe, especially since we won’t be here for much longer. Which leads me to the good news! I got approved for public housing! I won’t share too many details, but I will share the most important one — we’ll get to move in in a little over three weeks. There are a lot of logistics that I need to work out (the school bus system, a mode of transportation to work, etc) but I'm glad that something is working out in my favor after this week of hell. The constant vigilance is exhausting, and I can't wait to be in a safer environment. I guess all I really have left to say is that I’m not sure how to go about providing the evidence I have to the police. When I give them what I have, they’ll start some kind of investigation, right? I’m just nervous that I could get into trouble for the camera. And the messaging; that counts as harassment, right? Do I tell my sister everything before I go to the police? Any advice you can give is welcome, because I’ve never been in a situation like this before, and I don’t want to mess it up. Just because I am leaving does not mean that I’m letting David get away with what he’s done. Thank you all for your unwavering support. I'm having a hard time right now, but I'll update as soon as I can. Thank you for listening. TLDR; found David harassing my son via messages and caught him on camera taking my son’s clothing. Will provide evidence to the police so they can build a case. Am planning on telling my sister everything. Got approved for housing, and will be moving out very soon. ETA: Thank you for the overwhelming advice. I put the clothing into a paper bag; I had no idea how plastic could affect it. I will make copies of the texts and the camera footage. I will not be telling my sister anything for the time being, and I am going to the police tomorrow. I am looking into getting a lawyer as well. Roman's school has already been informed that I am the only guardian allowed to pick him up. He will be staying with a friend tomorrow night, and once I save a little money I will move us back to the motel. ~~~ Edit: New Update Reminder - I am NOT the original poster. Don't forget that commenting on the original posts is not allowed. submitted by /u/SJDude13 to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

Hundred year flood. That’s what started it all. It was long before I was born. My dad was a kid when it happened. They lost their house. He doesn’t remember much - grandma and grandpa sent him to stay with some friends that were up on higher ground when the rain kept coming and coming. He has vague memories of being bored out of his mind and the adults coming and going, talking to each other in hushed voices. He remembers the woman - grandma’s friend - cooking for what felt like all day, saying that the food was going to the churches and the community center and everywhere else that people were staying who had lost their homes. Then grandma and grandpa came back for him and he found out there was no home to go back to. They lived in a rental for a bit over a year in the next town over. It was a hard year, he said, as he was going to a different school and didn’t know anyone. But they were lucky. They got a new house and moved back. Lots of families that went away just… never returned. The town shrank after the flood and while the population eventually recovered as new families moved in, it lost a lot of the people that remembered what happened. Grandma died seven years ago. Grandpa died five years ago. And dad - well, he was only a kid. Mom certainly doesn’t remember anything because she isn’t from here. They met in college and when he wanted to move back home to be close to his family, she agreed. She certainly didn’t want to be near her family. I still haven’t met my maternal grandparents. Don’t even know if they’re still alive. Mom doesn’t talk about it. I didn’t particularly want to come back here. It’s a small town and there’s not a lot going on around it. Just flat, open fields of corn and soybeans. The river, of course, but it's not very exciting either. Every bit as flat as the terrain around it, meandering back and forth in gentle curves until it passes through the center of town. People go kayaking on it in the summer, but that’s the extent of its relevance to the town. Other than the flood, of course. The hundred year flood that barely anyone remembers. This was more a town for established families. Young couples ready to settle down and have their first child and maybe a few more. People like my parents who had roots here and were looking towards retirement. It wasn’t the place for someone fresh out of college and wanting to start a career. But when dad got his diagnosis I had to reconsider what my priorities were. He protested, of course, but I knew how to spin it. It wouldn’t be that long, I said. Half a year. Plenty of people take a short break after college to go on some dream trip or something before finding a job. I wasn’t flying overseas to backpack across Europe or anything exciting like that, I said, but it would still be like a vacation. A staycation. A staycation at my parent’s house in my old bedroom with the occasional trip to the hospital for dad’s chemotherapy appointments. None of us were particularly afraid. The oncologist had said ‘curable.’ Not ‘treatable.’ Curable. It’s an important difference. So we would go to the appointments and this was going to be hard but it was just one small part of our lives and we’d get through it and everything would keep going after that. That’s what I told myself. This was just a pause. Still, it felt weird to be moving my belongings back into my old bedroom. I was going to move to Seattle. I’d already picked out a couple of rentals I could afford for a few months while I searched for a job. They weren’t in the city, but they were close enough and I could always move to someplace nicer once I was more stable. Instead, I found myself standing on the creaky wooden floor of my old bedroom, staring at the narrow twin bed I’d spent most of my life sleeping in. My parents had started using the bedroom as storage and half of the room was lined with boxes that used to be in the basement. Dad didn’t like keeping things in the basement, not after losing everything he ever owned in the flood as a child. “We can move those back,” my mom said apologetically as I surveyed the mess. “I’ll move them,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.” “Don’t you need to be looking for jobs though?” “That’s not going to take all day. I’m going to put in like three hours worth of submitting applications and then the rest of the time is going to be spent helping out around here, okay?” She thinned her lips like she did when she wasn’t happy but didn’t think it was worth disagreeing. I’d long since grown immune to feeling any guilt when this happened. This was what I wanted to do and I was going to do it. “I don’t want the boxes in the basement.” My father materialized behind her in the doorway. He hadn’t started chemo yet, but he was already wearing a blue surgical mask. He didn’t want anything getting in the way of his treatment. I’d need to start wearing one soon as well, I thought. “I’ll move them back out when I leave,” I promised. “Have you looked at the weather? It’s going to rain all next week. This house shouldn’t even have a basement. None of the houses around here should have basements.” “They have basements because of the tornado risk,” my mom sighed. This was an old argument. My dad seemed to be picking a lot of fights over the same things again and again lately. I suspected it served as a distraction from the cancer. “When’s the last time we had a tornado around here?” he asked. But he was already walking off down the hallway. My mom’s voice drifted after him as she followed him, leaving me to do what I wanted with the boxes and to get my own things unpacked. “When’s the last time we had a flood?” I muttered, hefting the first of the boxes. I swear, they were all full of dishware and probably weighed 50 lbs each. I lugged them back to a vacant corner of the basement that I assumed used to be where they resided. There was an odd smell down there that took me a while to place. At first I thought it was mold and I searched the corners and walls and turned the flashlight on my phone and carefully examined the ceiling. There wasn’t a drop of moisture that I could find, which was a relief. The last thing my parents needed to be dealing with right now on top of dad’s diagnosis was water damage. With the last box downstairs, I paused to take a couple deep breaths in one last attempt to identify the smell. It wasn’t musty, I thought. No mold or mildew. It reminded me of the outdoors, but not quite like a summer day or being in a forested area. Something else. It struck me as I went upstairs. Hay, I thought. It smelled like hay. ​ I didn’t think much about it. Not until almost a week later, after dad’s first chemotherapy appointment. It was later in the day and mom and I were taking care of the evening chores. All that was left was running the trash out to the bin. Mom had already taken the trash out to the curb, but the kitchen trash had filled up since then, and she didn’t want dad to try to take it out because it was raining. It’d been raining since yesterday. Just a steady rain, the kind that saturated the ground and backed up storm drains. It should stop sometime in the night, according to the forecast. I put on a jacket and headed outside. Sunset had come early on account of the overhead clouds, but it wasn’t dark enough for the street lights to come on yet. There was a foul smell in the air, lingering over the scent of damp earth, and I wrinkled my nose. Surely it wasn’t the trash. I lifted the lid of the bin, tossed the bag in, and then saw the source of it a short distance away. Poop. There was poop on the sidewalk. A big pile of it. Some animal had come by and pooped in front of our house. “Gross,” I muttered. At least the rain would wash it away. Dad was waiting in the entryway when I came back in. He shuffled over and reached for my jacket, so I turned around to let him take it off and put it away. Even cancer-stricken, he wanted to be a gentleman sometimes. “Mom didn’t like it when I went out in the rain,” he said, shaking the water off my jacket. “She’d get real upset and tell me I wasn’t allowed out.” “Did she not want you getting wet or something?” I asked. “No, I mean she’d be really upset.” He frowned. “Sometimes she’d cry.” That startled me. Grandma always seemed very grounded to me. Like a mountain that could weather anything. She was resilient. She didn’t get angry very often and when she did, it was more a quiet disappointment that felt even worse than being screamed at. I’d never experienced it, thank goodness. But crying? I couldn’t imagine my grandmother crying. “Well, someone is out in the rain,” I said grouchily. “They let their dog poop on your sidewalk.” My dad suddenly came to life. He tapped into that energy that the chemotherapy hadn’t begun to erode yet. “I know who that is!” he exclaimed. “Here - let me get a paper bag. We’ll scoop it up and leave it on their front porch.” “No you won’t!” My mother’s voice came from somewhere upstairs. Clearly I’d found another one of their long-standing disagreements. But dad was already rummaging in the pantry. “It’s probably nice and soggy too,” he said gleefully. “I hope the bag falls apart when they pick it up and it falls on their foot. I don’t understand why they can’t just pick it up like they’re supposed to. Their dog isn’t even that big.” Well at least this gave me a way to head dad off from his plan of petty revenge. “I don't think it’s them, if it’s a small dog,” I said. “It was… huge. Like. It looks like horse poop, honestly.” He paused. He’d found the paper bags, unfortunately. I had to talk him out of this quickly. “No horses around here anymore,” he finally said. “Had to be a dog. Not sure who owns a dog that big.” “It’s fine, the rain will wash it away,” I said. “Besides, mom doesn’t want you going out in the rain.” She was still yelling from upstairs. Neither of us were really listening to her at this point, but I think that was the gist of what she was saying. Dad sighed and put the bags back. “Okay, but if you see them letting their dog poop out there,” he said, “do me a favor and throw it back onto their front porch, okay?” I lied and said I would. ​ I was starting to hate the boxes in the basement. Dad was growing increasingly more obsessed with them. It was the chemo, mom said. It was stressful and he didn’t feel well and he was finding other things to be concerned about. It wasn’t logical, but none of what was happening to our family made sense anymore. We just had to get through it and in the meantime, if it made dad feel better to do something about the basement, then we’d just go along with it. She’d rent a storage unit if she had to, if that made him stop fretting about it. She was afraid he’d go down there and start unpacking them himself. I was afraid of the same thing. The last thing I wanted was my cancer-stricken father carrying 50 lbs of plates and bowls up and down the stairs. So after I finished sending out some job applications and scheduling interviews from the few replies I’d gotten, I went down into the basement with a box knife to see what was inside them. As expected, there were a lot of plates. I set most of them aside in a ‘to get rid of’ pile. There was a green-tinted glass serving platter that I set aside to check if it was some kind of vintage or antique that might be worth saving. Then, three boxes of dishware down, I got to the photo albums. They weren’t in great shape. The plastic cover for each page had fused with the faint layer of glue. I flipped through a handful of them, seeing photos of my birthday parties and my first ballet recital. They appeared to be in chronological order so I dug deeper, curious to see how far back they went. The photos grew steadily more washed out, the colors fading and finally turning into sepia tones. I finally paused on a page containing photos of my grandmother as a much younger woman, her hair dark and curly, holding a toddler on her knee. I eased the plastic off the page and pried the photo off with the tip of the knife. I checked the back. My dad was a little obsessive with writing dates on things and sure enough, I found his handwriting on the back with a year. He would have been three in this photo, by my math. I took the album upstairs with me and found mom. “We need to do something about these,” I said, flipping it open. “Look. The page protectors are starting to break down and I’m worried they’ll damage the photos.” “Oh. Yeah, we should store them in something else. How many did you find?” “Lots.” She took the photo of grandma when I handed it to her. “Who is that lady behind the couch?” I asked. She was leaning over the back, smiling broadly and staring at my dad. Her hair was chestnut in color, short and curly. “I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask your dad? He might be awake.” I took the photo upstairs with me. I put on one of the surgical masks we left hanging on the doorknob to dad’s bedroom before pushing the door open. They’d turned the office into an additional bedroom, putting a bed in there before I showed up so dad could isolate when he wasn’t feeling well or sleep without being disturbed by anyone else in the family. He was indeed awake, sitting propped up in bed and listlessly watching something on the TV. He looked inhumanely pale in the lurid glare of the screen and I averted my eyes. I didn’t like seeing him like that. “I found this photo in the basement,” I said. “Can I turn the lights on?” He nodded, not really taking his eyes off the TV. I flipped the switch and walked over, sitting down on the chair next to the bed. Just a few more months, I thought. A few more months and he’d be done with this. “Who is this?” I asked. I pointed at the woman in the photo. He took the photo from me and stared at her for a long time. “I think that’s my aunt,” he finally said. “I don’t remember her that well. She died when I was young.” He lay his hand back down on the bed. I waited a few minutes as he stared at the TV, waiting to see if he’d remember anything else. Then I noticed the steady rise and fall of his chest. He’d fallen asleep again. Probably for the best. I quietly took the photo, turned out the lights, and left him to sleep. After that, I started setting aside photos of her when I found them. I didn’t know my dad had an aunt. It was understandable that he didn’t talk much about her, if he didn’t remember her that well, and if she’d died young then it was likely grandma didn’t want to bring it up. Still, she fascinated me. She always looked so happy in the photos. I found a couple of her with horses, leading them by the reins with my dad in the saddle. I asked him if he remembered the horses and he didn’t, but he said there used to be a horse farm not far from where they lived. I drove by there one afternoon to see if I could see the horses or maybe recognize the big oak tree in the background of some of the photos. Instead, I found some empty posts where a sign might have once been, a gate, and ‘no trespassing’ signs. “Oh yeah, the farm shut down,” dad said when I told him about it. “They sold that property long ago and the people that own it now aren’t that friendly. Dad told me as a kid I wasn’t allowed to go over there and I’d be grounded for life if I did.” Grandpa wasn’t mean. My dad was just… a handful as a child, as I understood it. The threat hadn’t stopped my dad. He’d gone there anyway and hopped the fence and looked around. He’d found the horse barn, but it had collapsed by then, and was nothing more than sagging walls and a flattened roof. The entire thing had smelled of rotting hay. He hadn’t gone back after that. There wasn’t much to see. Just an empty field and a dilapidated building. ​ After that it began to rain in earnest. We were halfway through dad’s treatment. He slept a lot and when he was awake, he told long, rambling stories from his childhood. I thought it was the rain that was doing it. It seemed to make him remember his mom and her dire warnings to stay inside. He mentioned it often, shaking his head and saying it was the only time she was ever really strict with him. No going outside, he said. That was her thing. The flood must have been traumatic for them, I thought. It was starting to look like it might flood again. I didn’t walk down to the bridge anymore, but when we drove past I saw the city had erected barriers. It was getting close to the bottom of the bridge. Mom didn’t say anything about it, but I saw her glancing nervously at it. I don’t think dad noticed at all. He was usually trying not to throw up on the way back from chemo. After about three days of constant downpour, the rain stopped. Its absence was so stark that it woke me up in the night. For a moment I was disoriented by the uncanny silence until I realized that I could no longer hear the raindrops beating against my window. I lay wide awake in my bed, listening to the quiet outside and the beating of my own heart. Then the night was punctured by a shrill noise, distant and unfamiliar. Some kind of animal, I thought. Maybe a coyote. There were plenty of those around here. Then another cry, and another right after it. I sat up in bed. Maybe it wasn’t as far away as it sounded, I thought. I could feel my breathing and heart speeding up, some instinctual part of my body growing alarmed at the noise. It was fine, I told myself. I was inside. It was nothing. I took a deep breath. In fact, I thought, it might just be the TV. Dad had taken to falling asleep with it on. Mom sometimes turned it off during the night, but I always slept through it. I got out of bed, trying to walk softly so that the floor wouldn’t creak, and entered the hallway. I crept into dad’s room, putting on my mask first to be safe. The TV was on and I couldn’t see much in the sudden glare, my eyes slow to adjust. I fumbled around for the remote and turned the power off. The screams continued. That’s what they were, I realized. Some kind of animal screaming. It wasn’t coming from the TV, either. And dad wasn’t asleep in his bed. It was empty. Anxiously, I hurried from the room. I glanced into the master bedroom where my mom was still asleep before I descended the stairs. The cries were louder now. They were growing closer. I found dad in the entryway. He was looking outside through the windows to either side of the front door. I came over to stand next to him, looking outside at the street. There was a haze in the air, thick coils of fog wrapping around the nearby houses and turning them into hunkered shadows in the night, indistinct and ominous. “Mom always said I couldn’t go out when it rained,” he whispered. “Honestly, I didn’t want to go out there. Not when it rained like this.” “Because of the flood?” I ventured. “I remember screaming,” he said faintly. “There was always screaming when it rained. Only I heard it.” There was a current of water in the street. It lapped at the edges of the curb, roiling past the tires of parked cars, and continued on and out of sight. Like the river, I thought. It reminded me of the river. Then it started to rain again, returning in a violent curtain of water, and the cries were drowned out in the thunderous downpour. ​ It began to feel like dad was made of glass. He wore layers because he was cold and it was like the clothing swallowed him up. It felt like he’d shatter at any moment and all those shirts and jackets were just padding so nothing could hurt him. Mom and I worried a lot, in quiet, when he wasn’t within earshot. She marked the days off on the calendar, counting down until he was done with his chemotherapy. We were over halfway done, she’d say. Almost there. Then one evening, I called for dad to come down for dinner and he didn’t. After about ten minutes of waiting, I went up to check on him, thinking that maybe his TV was up too loud. He wasn’t really watching anything he enjoyed most of the time. It was just something to keep himself distracted. But he wasn’t in his room. I went back down and told mom, who sighed dramatically and asked if I’d check the basement. Maybe he was obsessing over those boxes again, she said. He’d better not be trying to lift them. With that grim warning hanging over my head, I headed down into the basement, hoping he wouldn’t be down there. I didn’t want to be around that particular argument between them. The smell of hay hit me when I stepped off the stairs. It was almost overwhelming. This time, it smelled musty, with a faint hint of mildew. I felt sick inhaling it. I navigated around the shelves and stacks of boxes, looking for either my dad or some evidence of a leak. Dad wasn’t down here, but I took my time inspecting the walls. We had been getting a lot of rain lately and I didn’t want to overlook any problems. I’d just finished a lap of the basement when I paused by the windows. They were narrow slits at the top of the wall, just barely above the ground level on the outside of the house. Very little light came in through them with the storm clouds overhead, but it was making strange patterns on the ground. I stared at it for a second, watching as the faint traces of remote sunlight swayed across my shoes. Like I was underwater. Startled, I jerked my gaze up to the window. Water. There was water covering them. I ran up the stairs. I didn’t say anything to mom, I just ran out through the back door and to the side of the house. The grass squished and gave under my feet, but when I rounded the corner, I didn’t see any standing water. The windows were fine. The ground was saturated, but we weren’t flooding. Not yet. “Is everything okay?” mom asked when I came back in. “Yeah, I thought I saw something outside,” I replied as I wiped my feet dry. What had I seen? I wasn’t sure anymore. “I looked in the garage,” mom said. “The car is gone.” Dad had left the house. There was no reason he couldn’t obviously, he was a grown man. And sure, he was exhausted all the time, but that was the chemo and if he felt strong enough to run an errand then why shouldn’t he? I saw the worry in mom’s face, though. He hadn’t told any of us. He’d been acting a little erratically since the cancer treatments had started. I gave up on drying my shoes and went to the hallway to get my jacket. “I’ll go see if I can find him,” I offered. “Call me if he comes home.” I checked the grocery store. The nearby gas station. I went to the dollar store. I checked every place I thought that someone bored and anxious for a quick change of scenery might visit. Nothing. There weren’t many cars in the parking lots, on account of the weather, and their car wasn’t among them. Then I had a thought. I called mom and asked what the address to dad’s childhood home had been. He’d been reminiscing a lot, I said, and perhaps he’d gone there. I had to drive slowly, for there was standing water in the road leading to the old house. The neighborhood was sorely neglected. There were some houses, but most of them were vacant and had signs attached to the doors indicating they were condemned. This area had never recovered from the flood and no one was trying to rebuild it. It’d been abandoned. I felt that was understandable, considering how badly the road was flooding already. I eased the car up out of the water and into the crumbling driveway. Dad’s car was there. And dad was standing at the edge of the driveway, staring at the concrete foundation that was all that remained of his childhood home. He looked so small in the rain. Like a sand castle being slowly washed away. I felt like if I waited too long, he’d simply dissolve and drift away in the run-off. I got out of the car and walked over with an umbrella. He was shivering underneath his raincoat. Had my dad always been this thin? Had I just not noticed the chemotherapy eating him away in tiny slivers? “Mom is worried,” I said, standing next to him, staring at the empty plot of dirt and young trees that were slowly reclaiming where his house had once stood. They swam in growing puddles of standing water. “Sorry,” he said. “I just had a sudden idea to come out here. I’ve been thinking about death a lot.” “You’re not going to die,” I said firmly. “I know. Only one month left. But I don’t know, something like this… it just makes you think about it.” But why here? Why the old house? I licked my lips nervously. “What happened to your aunt?” I asked. “She drowned. Dad told me when I was in college.” “During the flood?” “During the flood.” She was helping his parents get some things from the house before it completely flooded, he said. They weren’t able to save a lot because the water was rising too fast and they were afraid of being trapped inside. So they’d given up after only a few trips and were about to leave when his aunt had heard something. The horses. They were still in their barn and the river was consuming the pastures. His aunt went to free them. And perhaps she succeeded, he said, for they found her body some distance from the horse barn. They’d made it out of the pasures, even. But at some point, they’d possibly been cut off, and his aunt had been swept away and drowned. They found her body caught on a tree when the waters receded. They never found the bodies of the horses. “We should go home,” I said. “Mom is keeping dinner warm.” “I’m not hungry anymore.” “I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I hugged his shoulders and we stood there for a bit until he began to shiver. Then he reluctantly went back to his car, saying he’d better at least try to eat or mom would be sad. I waited a moment, glancing back over the remains of his home one last time, and then followed in my own car. He was thinking about death. I understood - logically - why, but it still bothered me. All I wanted to think about was his last day of treatment and when this would all be over. It was like our entire lives had been put on pause and I was holding my breath and waiting for everything to start moving again. I glanced at the vacant houses as we drove slowly past them. Like driving through a cemetery of lives uprooted, I thought. Little wonder dad came here if he was in a morbid mood. Then I slammed on the brakes. Someone was staring at me through one of the windows. The condemned notification fluttered on the door, the ink faded into near illegibility. A pale face with dark hair. I couldn’t make out anything else through the rain. Then I saw dad’s brakelights up ahead as he stopped to wait for me. I glanced at them, then glanced back at the building. The face was gone. I kept driving. ​ We had a few weeks of sunshine and dad’s chemotherapy progressed. It was a small town, but it was still big enough to have its own hospital, not far from downtown. They only allowed one person back with the patient, so mom would go with dad and I’d take a walk. The hospital was close to main street that stretched all the way through downtown. A bridge went over the river and I’d walk down there, watch the water for a little bit, and then walk back. I began to notice that even with the sunshine, the river wasn’t receding. It was still raining upstream, one of the locals commented one day, when we were both staring over the edge of the bridge and into the water. He hadn’t seen it this high in a long time. He was older than my dad, so I asked him about the flood. “Lot of people lost their houses,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Then there was that business with the horses.” “I think that was my great aunt,” I said. “Oh!” He looked at me closer. “I remember you now. Didn’t recognize you all grown up.” I had no idea who this man was but clearly he remembered me as a child. It was an uncomfortable feeling and I concentrated on the river instead, watching the water churn as it passed beneath the bridge. “They say you can see them,” he said. “Look.” He pointed at the water, where it turned into a white froth at the bridge supports. I squinted, unsure of what I was looking at. Something dark. Something dark in the water. Then a hard edge broke the water’s surface and I saw a black, vacant hole like an eye and the ivory of bone. A flash of teeth and a distant, shrill sound, like the wind or like a scream from a rotting throat. I thought of my dad, swallowing his soup, his skin stretched tight like plastic wrap over his esophagus. Then the creature vanished beneath the water again. “They’ve come back,” the man said. “It’s going to flood again. Just you wait and see. And tell your parents I said ‘hi’.” Then he walked off and I didn’t want to call after him and ask who the hell he was. I just wanted to leave. I stopped walking past the bridge after that. ​ As the old man had predicted, it started raining again. And it began to flood. We saw on the news that the river had overflowed the bridge and they were asking people to evacuate the downtown area. Dad grumbled about the basement and I silently went to carry the remaining boxes upstairs without really knowing where to put them. Whatever made him feel better, because mom’s assurances that this house was well out of the flood zone wasn’t doing much to calm him. A hundred year flood. We were in a hundred year flood. There wasn’t a lot we could do but wait. We still had to make it to dad’s chemotherapy appointments, but we couldn’t take the bridge through downtown anymore. We had to drive around instead, out to the highway and then back. It took an hour and on the way back dad would groan and turn a sickly green color as he struggled with nausea for the duration of the long drive. I didn’t have anywhere to take walks now, so I sat in the waiting room with my mask on. I could stay with dad for a little bit, while they got him ready, but then when they took him back I’d have to leave. That was how I was there the day they couldn’t find his vein and kept trying and trying. I saw the blood spots spreading underneath his skin and then when they finally got the IV in, I quietly excused myself, telling my dad cheerfully that I’d see him when he was done. I started crying as soon as I left. I couldn’t stay here, I thought desperately. I couldn’t just sit here and cry and think about how the chemo was eating up my dad and we could only hope it killed the cancer faster than it killed him. So I left. I left the hospital and started walking. It was drizzling, but not heavy enough that I needed an umbrella. I walked down main street to the edge of the flood. The surface of the water was placid, moving sluggishly among the buildings. Like a giant puddle, I thought. Just a giant puddle, like the kind I’d splash around in when I was a kid. The water was to my ankles before I realized that my body was still moving. I paused, confused, staring down at my shoes that were barely visible beneath the murky water. What was I doing, standing here like this? Then I looked up and there he was. Dad. My heart skipped a beat. His back was to me and he was walking into the water. I hurriedly waded after him, the floodwater growing deeper with every step. It splashed noisily around my knees and I called to him, yelling that he needed to go back, that the nurses were probably wondering where he’d gone. That it was okay, that he’d finish his chemo and everything would go back to normal and we’d all just move on from this long, horrible nightmare. But he kept walking. And I kept going, until the water was up to my waist. Only then did I pause and so did he. He stood there and it was like his body was the same color as the water, his dark and curly hair the only bright spot on its muddy surface. It was like I was in a dream and I couldn’t wake up. This didn’t seem right. His hair. His dark and curly hair. The chemo had taken his hair already. He was bald now. This wasn’t my dad. My dad was back at the hospital with an IV pumping medicine into his body. They turned to look at me. Their hair was the same color as my dad’s had been and it was curly like his, but it was a woman and her skin was flush with color and the chemotherapy hadn’t eaten away at her cheeks and left her as nothing but a bundle of bones. She looked frightened. The water was at her chest. I reached out my hand to her, opening my mouth to call to her and tell her to come towards me, but nothing came out. Then the water turned turbulent around her, the tops forming white peaks, and her entire body jerked to one side. She toppled, into the water, and vanished beneath its murky surface. It was like the dream was broken. I screamed. I waded into the water, thrashing desperately towards where she’d been. It was past my waist now. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t go further. I might get swept away too. But where was she? Where had she gotten swept away to? Then something hit my legs. Something large. My knees crumpled and I went backwards into the water. I righted myself just as quickly as I’d fallen, getting my head above water, but the current had quickly carried me deeper into the river’s grasp. I couldn’t find the ground beneath me anymore. I flailed, trying to grab hold of something - anything - as I struggled to find the ground with my toes. I could feel the tips of my shoes scraping pavement. I just wasn’t quite tall enough. Inexorably, the water drew me towards the center of the river and the churning current that overwhelmed the bridge. Where I’d seen entire trees being dragged down underneath the water the day prior on the news. Frantically, I tried to swim, tried to direct myself in a different direction. I was so small though, so small and weak against the water’s pull. It felt like I couldn’t breathe and I thought that this couldn’t be happening, that I couldn’t drown when we were so close to being done with all of this, when we were so close to finishing his treatment and slipping through death’s fingers and escaping. But the river was in control now and my arms and legs were burning with exertion. I could barely keep my head above the surface of the churning water. Then my hands touched something. Something solid. I grasped at it, found that it was broad, and I threw my arm around it. It surged up, breaking through the surface of the water next to me. A horse. My arm was wrapped around the neck of a horse. It rolled its head to look at me and I expected to see eyes wild with terror, lips peeled back in its frenzy. I stared instead into empty eye sockets, the flesh peeling back from the bone in shades of gray and green. Tiny holes dotted its sagging cheeks, little pinpricks where worms burrowed their tunnels into its decaying muscle. Its teeth were bared because the lips had long ago sloughed off. And where my arm touched it, where my fingers dug into its neck in a desperate attempt to find something solid to cling to, the flesh gave. I felt cold liquid spilling out from where the skin tore open, as cold as the water around me. The water churned all around me. More heads broke the surface, their manes falling out, their ears missing, and their empty eye sockets turning towards the sky and the rain falling overhead. They clustered tight around me, their bodies bumping into mine, and their legs thrashed at the water, desperately trying to keep their heads aloft. The herd, I realized. The herd that drowned. They were still trying to escape the flood waters. I heard the noise of an engine from somewhere behind me. I twisted, still holding tight to the horse’s neck. Two inflatable boats were heading towards me. I raised an arm and waved at them, yelling, and one of the men in a bright life vest waved back. They saw me. They were coming. The horses sank below the waters just before they reached me. I watched their skulls vanish into the water, I felt the firm pressure of one of them as it slipped underneath me, putting its back under my feet, and with one last push it shoved me up out of the flood and into the boat. My great-aunt had tried to save them, so long ago, and now they were trying to save me. Hands grabbed my arms and shirt and they heaved me the rest of the way in and I sat there in a soaking, shaking heap among the rescue team. “There was a woman,” I cried. “She was in the water so I was trying to get to her and bring her back, but she got pulled under. I was trying to reach her when I lost my footing.” One of the men spoke into a radio. The other boat broke off and began piloting downriver, following the current and the direction I pointed in. They’d look for her, my rescuers promised. They’d get me to safety in the meantime. “No one saw anyone else, though,” someone said. “We got the call when you were swept away but they didn’t say anything about anyone else.” “She was there. I saw her.” “We’ll keep looking.” They wouldn’t find her, I realized. She was as trapped here in the waters as the horses were. Trying to reach them. Trying to save them. “What about the horses,” I gasped. “Did you see the horses?” My rescue team glanced at each other. No, they said. There was just me. Just me and the churning water around me. I refused transport to the hospital and instead a stranger offered me a ride home. I called my mom using their phone, told her I’d dropped mine in the water and that I was going to catch a ride to a repair place and see if it could be fixed. I’d meet them at home. I didn’t tell them I almost drowned. I didn’t tell them about my great aunt or the horses. A lot of houses were lost in the flood. There was only one drowning death and I read the announcement anxiously, trying to see if they had dark and curly hair. It was a man though. A young man that had stayed behind to try to get more of his things out of his apartment before it flooded. There was no mention of a woman and they didn’t find any bodies even after the water receded. Dad finished his chemotherapy. I stayed for a few more months while he recovered from the ordeal and then I got a job offer and it was time to move on to somewhere else and start the next part of my life. I packed up my things, but by then, we’d sold or donated most of the dishware and other assorted things in the basement. There weren’t any boxes to move back into my bedroom. I went back into the basement one last time, though. I took a few deep breaths. It didn’t smell like anything. There was no trace of the smell of hay. And outside, I backed out of their driveway and drove away in the bright sunlight with not a cloud in the sky. submitted by /u/fainting--goat to r/nosleep [link] [comments]

I’m going winter camping at 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I wanted to ask if this sleeping bag I currently have is sufficient or if I need to buy a new one. Coolzon Lightweight Backpacking Sleeping Bag for Adults Boys and Girls, Cold Weather Kids Sleeping Bag for All Season Hiking & Camping https://a.co/d/8LGPmuw submitted by /u/xuhu55 to r/CampingGear [link] [comments]

Several years ago my brother, Dan, moved from California to Washington state and built a 3 bedroom house on one of two parcels of land he had bought when he was 18 years old. He lived in a nice community with a small lake and had an HOA. During the 2008 economic crash he ran into financial trouble, so we helped him. To repay us for the help, in March of 2016 he came down to California for an extended period to work on our house, which was neglected because of helping him. He was very proficient at renovating houses and did fantastic work. In November my brother's friend, Jake, called him and asked if a friend of his, Tuna, could stay in one of the rooms for $400 per month. Dan had worked for many years with Jake doing construction for a house flipper, so he trusted Jake's judgement, needed the money, and thought it might be good to have someone trustworthy there to watch his house. Dan drove back up to Washington, cleaned out a room, put a lock on his bedroom door, locked the door, and put some of his things in a storage area up out of the way in the garage. Tuna seemed nice and gave Dan $400 for the first month. There was never a written rental agreement. It was just verbal, and meant to be temporary, because Dan was going to return in 6 months. Tuna never sent another payment. We would call and ask her, and she always said it had been sent, but nothing ever arrived. So what was going on at his house? We pieced together that something wrong was going on there after Dan's neighbor called, and after questioning Jake. The neighbor complained that the house had turned into a drug house, full of people and cars coming and going all hours of the night! At the beginning of June, 2017, Dan drove back to Washington and handed Tuna a 3 Day Eviction Notice. She left, stating that she had somewhere else to live, and would get her stuff later. He was allowing her to retrieve her stuff at a later date. He just wanted her out. He started working on repairs and cleaning up the house. I mailed Dan a care package with some clothes, a California themed shopping bag, and gift cards for gas and food. 5 days later Tuna showed up with 2 men, who punched Dan in the face. They wanted to take the house back by force. Dan went to the neighbor and called the police. The police came, and instead of arresting the men and Tuna, they took Dan to jail for missing a child support court date, which then put a warrant on him. Before coming to California he thought everything regarding child support back payments for his independent successful 23 year old adult child had been taken care of. He had no idea about a court date, since they notify by mail, and Tuna had never forwarded his mail, which was one of the things she promised to do. (The child support scam on Dan is another issue I will have to submit later.) So, the police essentially handed the house over to Tuna. She and her cronies went in, changed the locks and placed a long metal bar across the inside of the garage door so it could not be opened from the outside. They stole the package I sent to Dan and spent the gift cards. Meanwhile, my family and I were on vacation in Hawaii and I received a phone call from Dan in jail. I spent a whole day of my vacation in the hotel room trying to figure out how to get him out of jail. Bail bonds could not be used for child support cases. Finally they let him out when I paid a child support payment of $350. He had been in jail for 3 days and the squatters had dug themselves in, so when he returned to his house he had to call the police to arrest them for trespassing. After all, Tuna had been evicted, left, and no longer had permission to be there. They were squatters by all accounts, but the state defers to people who just claim they are renting, therefore requiring a "landlord" to go through the court system to remove the so called "tenants", who are actually squatters. The police came and screwed him over once again. Tuna claimed she was renting the (entire) house, and the police believed her instead of Dan. She told the policeman that she would leave in 10 days and the policeman told Dan that he could have his house back in 10 days because Tuna said she would leave by then. Are you kidding me? Dan was instructed to leave the premises or be arrested. It was his house! She was trespassing! He got into his minivan and drove away, with nowhere to stay but in his van. Of course, Tuna did not leave after 10 days. Dan went back after 10 days and called the police again. Once again the police told him to leave or be arrested. We didn't know what to do next. One of the HOA board members, who had some experience in managing real estate properties attempted to help us. She said that he needed a 20 Day Eviction Notice, then Tuna would be out, and this had always worked for her when she had to evict tenants. OK. So the 20 day notice was posted and we waited. Tuna did not leave. Dan went over to his house, and started cleaning up trash strewn all over the yard, waiting for her to leave. Tuna called the police, stating that she was a renter and he was disturbing her. Once again Dan was asked to leave or be arrested. This time Dan put his phone on speaker, and I heard the whole interaction between him and the police. Yes, he had to leave or be arrested. Dan could not even get his construction tools out of the garage and could not work without his tools, and with being homeless, how do you even work? What was going to happen to all of his possessions, his sentimental things? His room had been broken into long before, his things removed, and people had used the room. It was near the end of Summer. We were paying his mortgage payments and it was getting so hard on everyone. Then something nice happened. A kind friend, Adam, asked him to stay at his house, which Dan did. During this time Dan worked for Adam with loaned tools, and also went to some landlord / tenant educational meetings. The people at the meetings were helpful and instructed Dan on how to proceed by taking the matter to the court. The police would not go further without a court order to physically evict Tuna. It would be difficult to afford the cost to hire a lawyer, but eventually we did end up getting a lawyer. Dan posted a court appearance on the door of his house, since Tuna never answered the door, and that is what you do legally in this case. Every time he posted a court appearance, he had to legally give her 1 week notice, which he did. He showed up at court and Tuna failed to show up. So he won by default, right? Wrong. The judge said that Tuna was not given proper notice because the notice was posted by Dan instead of an anonymous person. Dan walked out of the courtroom. The lawyers from the landlord / tenant meetings were there and couldn't believe it. Unfortunately Adam had to move out of his house he was renting, so Dan had to go back to living in his van. It was Autumn in the Pacific NW and getting cold. The police had started harassing him if he slept in his van. We rented motel rooms for Dan. Once while at a motel, Dan heard a knock on the door in the middle of the night. He thought it was the motel staff and opened the door. Two men burst into the room and proceeded to beat the crap out of him to rob him. They broke his finger and gave him a concussion. Dan ran to his van, drove it to a parking lot and slept. He refused to go back to the motel. Things were starting to go downhill in a very bad way. I found a lawyer from a non-profit who worked for free to help. He actually used that 3 Day Eviction Notice that Dan had given Tuna back in June as a basis for the case. I had found it online, the wording was appropriate, and it had been served properly. The lawyer had to jump through endless hoops and court appearances. The same judge presided over every case that had to do with evictions, and she always favored the tenants, including entitled ones. This took forever, like 3 more months, and Dan became haggard, homeless, sick, depressed, and at times had gone missing. Once I called every hospital, jail, homeless shelter, and even the food bank, looking for him. His van was impounded 4 times. He was hospitalized 4 times. He was endlessly hunted down and harassed by the police. Three times I found him because I was listed as his emergency contact on his state insurance when he showed up at hospitals. While all of this was happening to Dan, my husband was in a serious motorcycle accident, and I had to take care of my husband, changing his dressings, etc. Ok I'm crying right now. This was so hard to endure, remember, and difficult to write about. I couldn't leave and fly up to Washington to help my brother, but I was doing everything down here to get his house back with the lawyer. I got him motel rooms at other motels when I could. I paid 4 times to get his van out of impound. I sent him cell phones and care packages, delivered at UPS stores. One time Dan was lost and didn't have his van or phone. He ended up at a hospital who contacted me. He told me that he had felt really sick, and had gone to the hospital earlier, who released him after examining him, even after he pleaded with them to let him stay because he felt horribly sick. He ended up collapsed on the sidewalk by the Salvation Army shelter (who wouldn't let him in) and another homeless person called 911. So he was back at that hospital with a very serious condition affecting his heart. I told the hospital to please call me at release time, so I could arrange a motel for Dan. They didn't. He was then found in a park in frigid weather dressed in a pair of scrubs, a t-shirt, hoody, and one shoe. A city policeman called me and took him to a motel, where he stayed awhile. I sent a care package there. Dan told me that one time when he was being harassed by the police for cooking food in a park, he mouthed off and told them they were communists and it was their fault that he was homeless because they gave his house to a squatter. A fire truck arrived so he was not arrested with the firemen there, but I don't think the police liked him much for saying that. In October Dan was arrested for drunk driving while he was sleeping in a Walmart parking lot. ???? I had to bail him out of jail over that. Every time he didn't get to court hearings they would post warrants for his arrest. One time he was in jail and they refused to give him his medication, so I had to bail him out beacuse he felt so awful. In mid November, the police arrested Dan again for not showing up to court for that so called "drunk driving" incident. He begged me to bail him out. Even though the bail bondsman paid the bail in the late afternoon, the jail released him in the middle of the night, again with no vehicle (impounded), a dead cell phone, no charger (in the van), no money, etc. I found out later that this jail only releases people at night, so they can get credit and are paid by the state for the whole day. That night he was released it was our deceased mother's birthday. Dan was then found unconscious in a ditch by a seawall in a Starbucks parking lot. He had a broken femur, broken hip, cracked spine, a head contusion, and that finger was still broken (from the motel incident). The doctors evaluated that he had been hit in the back of his head with a blunt object. We do not know who did it. The last thing he remembers was a police car driving by. He was air lifted to a major hospital in Seattle, about 50 miles from where he was. I took a flight up to Seattle as soon as I could and visited him. The doctors showed me the x-rays and he had countless rods and pins put into his body to put him back together. By this time we were getting closer to having his house back. I went by the house with Adam's brother in law, Paul, who was packing heat. We pounded on the door and I demanded that the squatters hand over "my dead mother's rocking chair". The stupid friend, Jake, was there and he handed it through the door. It is a big heirloom mission style chair and they had burned into the chair in 4" letters the word "WASTED". The court order finally became available, but then we had to schedule the eviction according to when the police had time to do it, which was another 2 weeks. It was scheduled for the beginning of December. I went back home to California briefly and returned the night of the eviction. Dan was in the hospital for almost 2 weeks. When he was released I arranged a nice long term stay type hotel back near home for him to live at until the police evicted the squatters. Paul helped us a lot. He was with the police at the eviction, changed all the locks and secured the house. He picked up Dan at the hotel and Dan got to witness the eviction of that entitled b*tch from hell. She was the only one left in the house. A notice had been posted on the door to warn everyone to leave, but as usual, she didn't think there would be any reason she would have to leave. It took her completely by surprise. The police pounded on the door and demanded she leave immediately. She asked if she could get this and that, but no, she couldn't. She grabbed her little dog, purse, and left with nothing else. The police put a notice on the door after Paul secured everything. Dan was driven back to the hotel and then I arrived. I wish I could have seen the eviction, but couldn't get a flight early enough. The neighbors said that a bunch of people came to the house that night pounding on the door trying to get in, but couldn't. They almost called the police, but the people left. We went over there every day for about a week to clean up. Dan was confined to a wheelchair and was on heavy meds, so it was hard. He couldn't help too much, but did his best. The house was a disaster. There was literally 5 tons of garbage in the yards around the house. The trash disposal service was not activated during this time, so they just piled it up around the house. On one side of the house was a huge pillar of trash made out of wire fencing. It was about 8 feet by 8 feet and at least 12 feet high. The front yard was awful with several piles of trash about 4 feet high. Tuna left every single thing in the kitchen, in the cupboards, and rotting food in pans. The carpets were soaked in dog pee. There were clothes and junk everywhere. There was loads of crushed glass embedded into the gravel driveway like she wanted us to get flat tires. Over the doorway from the house into the garage was a dangerous booby trap, which literally could have killed someone. It was made out of large heavy metal clamps with a glass jewelry case tetering on top of the clamps. It could have fallen on top of someone's head if not discovered and someone jarred it a little. The water had been shut off for months by the HOA because they controlled the well and owned the water system. As soon as you don't pay the HOA fees, water is shut off. All the toilets were clogged up with sh*t. The sewage system was impossible to unclog and later DB discovered that they had thrown dirt and plastic containers down the pipes. He had to go under the house and disassemble the pipes to get everything out. Hanging up on the wall in plain sight in the master bedroom was the California shopping bag I had mailed to Dan in the package that Tuna had stolen. She hung it there to taunt me. I am not super religious, but I felt the worst kind of evil there and had to pray and debuk the evil spirits from that house. I stayed for weeks there cleaning up and hired some people to do yard clean out to get the front yard clean. Later Dan and Adam dealt with the pillar of trash at the side of the house. EVERY CONSTRUCTION TOOL that belonged to Dan was stolen. He couldn't work much from a wheelchair, but needed the tools to repair his own house. Dan persisted though. He finally got to the point where he could walk. Now he can't walk for long periods, gets tired easily, but can do things slowly. He has some nice roommates that drive him places and take care of him at times. Many of his tools have been replaced. He sanded off the "WASTED" message on Mom's rocking chair. We have sunk a lot of money into helping him, but what else is one supposed to do? It was a life or death situation. That was his house he had built so many years ago. This was the most wicked thing I have ever encountered. It was coming from all directions. We heard that the creepy squatter died a year later. No one wanted to take her in and she went from person to person staying wherever. If she would have been decent and kind, she probably could have been a roommate and had a place, but she thought she could just take someone's house. submitted by /u/CaringSisterinCA to r/EntitledPeople [link] [comments]

My grandma died when I was little. I don't remember much about her apart from the vaguest memories: She always wore flowery dresses, and she always fed me treats when my mother wasn't looking. My grandpa never remarried. My mother always said it was because he loved his wife so much that nobody would be able to take her place. When I got older, I found this both heartbreaking and romantic. Grandma had had her own room - grandpa said it was because he snored so much they had to sleep separately. When she died, he locked her room up, and it was the only place in the house we were not permitted to go. Sometimes we would try to peep through the keyhole, but someone would always scream about seeing a ghost and we would all run away. I don't think grandpa was lonely: We were a big part of his life. He lived close by, so we all piled into his house regularly, filling his house with noise and life. I would play in his garden with my cousins whilst the adults talked and cooked. In the summer, the garden bloomed with the flowers my grandma had loved, hydrangeas being her favourite. In the winter, it was hung with balls of fat and birdseed, and the bird feeder was always fully stocked. My grandma had loved birds, grandpa said, and always worried that they wouldn't have enough to eat when the weather got colder. I was, unofficially, my grandpa's favourite. He would bounce me on his knee and sing a song about my name that I didn't understand but thought was hilarious. Lily the Pink. I took to wearing pink whenever I visited. He took over my grandma's job of handing out treats to all of us, cautioning us not to tell our parents, although I'm sure our parents knew full well what was going on from the tell-tale smears of chocolate around our mouths. He was a gentle, mild man who hardly ever raised his voice. The only time I can ever remember him being slightly angry is when my brother Craig and I were fighting. Craig had kicked me in the leg hard enough to leave the print of his shoe sole on me, and grandpa had almost shouted then. Unused to grandpa scolding us, Craig had started to cry, and grandpa had taken him aside and given him a long, serious talk about the importance of family. "You never hurt family," he had told him. "Your family is important." Craig always treated me pretty well after that. When grandpa grew frail, he needed more help. As his favourite, it naturally fell to me to take on part of his care. I shared my duties with a home carer, although they weren't really duties as I loved him so much. I would have done anything for grandpa. His mind remained mostly sharp, with occasional lapses that he referred to as "senior moments". Sometimes he would call me by my mother's name, but he would always correct himself. When he became seriously ill, I quit my job to be his full time carer. Being put in a nursing home was grandpa's biggest fear, and he made me promise over and over again that I wouldn't allow that to happen. "I can't leave her," he said. "She's still here. We said till death do us part and I'm not dead yet." Even as an adult I was not allowed into her room. He told me he had kept it exactly the same as the day she had died, a shrine to her memory. He got weak. He couldn't eat unless I spoon fed him. The nurse who visited every day fitted him with a catheter and told me he should really be in a hospice, but I ignored her. If he wanted to die at home, I would honour my promise to let him do so. He liked to talk to me. He reminisced about the day he had met my grandma; the day each grandchild was born. He loved having so many grandchildren, he told me. He loved to see us thrive, and mourned the fact that he wouldn't live to see his great grandchildren. My eldest cousin was pregnant, but it was doubtful he would be alive by the time she gave birth. He never got sad: He had lived a very full life, and a happy one. But he did get anxious, although he said he wasn't afraid to die. He said it was what might come after that worried him. He spent his last days barely aware of what was going on around him. Family visited, staying as long as they could, and sometimes his small, modest room was packed with people, spilling from the doorway. The kettle was never cold, the house never empty. Except for the night he finally died. I was with him, along with my mother and aunt. They had fallen asleep in their chairs, their genteel snores the only sound in the room besides the ticking of grandpa's old clock and the slow, laboured breaths of my Grandpa. He regained consciousness briefly before he died, and though I might have woken my mother and aunt so they could share, some selfish instinct stopped me from doing so. I knew, you see, and I wanted this moment to be my own. His eyes were bleary but they managed to focus on me. His cheeks twitched as he tried to muster a smile. "Lily the Pink," he whispered. I whispered back. "Yes, it's me." "I'm sorry," he said. I took the gnarled hand that lay on the covers. His fingers were cold. "You don't have to apologise, Grandpa," I told him. I wanted to cry, but he had always hated to see me cry. "Yes I do…" He sank back on his pillow, the exchange clearly exhausting him. "I'm sorry for what comes after," he said. "You never hurt family. Family is important." He died then, and that was when I allowed myself to cry. I would miss him, but I couldn't be sad for him: He was going to see Grandma after all these years. I imagined him strong again, walking into a white light and emerging on the other side to a garden where flowers always bloomed and the birds were always singing, my grandma waiting at the end of the path. As with his care, it fell mostly to me to clear out his house. I had help on the evenings and weekends, but most of the time it was just me. His room was the hardest for me to do, and I cried often as I worked. It would have been poetic if the clock in his room had stopped ticking when he died, but it continued to tick in defiance of my wishes, a constant background to my chore. I boxed everything up, sealing and labelling my grandpa's life. Everything he had experienced was being compartmentalised into what was of value and what was not. The richness and experience of his life had been reduced to odds and ends to be sorted to put away. I sorted things for charity; heirlooms to be shared out amongst the rest of the family; memories to be stored away in an attic. Everything I picked up had some kind of significance, whether it was the everyday detritus of his life or the mementoes of his history. A pen he would never write with again, a book he hadn't finished reading - these things were just as poignant as his medals and his photographs. There were old love letters from my grandma, souvenirs from holidays. Pictures we had painted for him, birthday cards we had sent. And finally, in the depths of an old, dented tobacco tin, buried beneath old cinema ticket stubs and faded postcards, the key to my grandma's room. It felt almost sacrilegious to go in there after all these years, yet the morbid fascination with Grandma's room had stayed with me since I was a child and I couldn't have kept out even if I hadn't had a job to do. From the way Grandpa had spoken about her presence in the house, I almost expected to open the door and find her there, either as a dessicated corpse stretched out on the bed or as a taxidermied mummy propped up in a chair. She wasn't, of course: The room was empty of life - and death - and had been for decades. It smelled stale in there, as was to be expected, and slightly sweet with an old scent that might have been violets and might have been roses. It was a very feminine room. The wallpaper bore the same floral motif she had favoured on her dresses. Grandpa had kept the curtains closed, so it hadn't faded, apart from a narrow stripe from a persistent sunbeam that angled towards the narrow bed. My first thought as I walked in was that it felt like a stage set. As if every item in the room was a prop. Had she died in here? I couldn't remember what I had been told. I found myself looking for signs of her passing, a life interrupted on the spot. As with my grandpa's room, I didn't know where to start. But this time it was because everything was so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. There were memories to be found here, as buried as the key to her room had been. The first thing I did was to pull open the curtains. With some natural light in there, everything felt a little more real, and I was able to look around without the feeling of dissociation I'd felt upon entering. I couldn't tackle her room that day. It was too soon. I wanted the chance to remember more, to explore, and to reconnect with the woman who had sat me on her knee. How could I discover this unknown life and collapse it all in the same day? Even though she had died long ago, it still felt like prying to go through her personal items. I sifted through her belongings with less sentimentality but more curiosity than I had with my grandpa's room. A beloved life was stored within these walls, but one I had barely any memory of, so whilst everything I picked up had a story behind it, I did not know what it was. There was a pegboard on one wall with baby bootees hung on it. I counted them, and they matched the number of grandchildren in the family. Grandma had, apparently, kept a pair from each of us. We were represented too in framed photos, both on the wall and on her dressing table, alongside perfume bottles from which the contents had long since evaporated, and old cosmetics with faded labels. There was also a jewellery box on her dressing table that drew my attention. Mother of pearl was inlaid on the lid, and it was cracked open, with a string of amber beads spilling out. That jewellery box summoned a stubborn memory: Of sitting on the knee of a woman who wore flowers and smelled like flowers, and sifting through the contents. The jewellery inside was all cheap stuff, but it was colourful and sparkling, something that would have fascinated younger me. I was allowed to choose anything, she said. Any piece I wanted. There was a butterfly brooch that I suddenly recalled pinned to her dress, right in the centre of a printed flower as though it had landed there to drink nectar. I had a whole box of cut price finery to choose from, but for some reason that brooch stood out. "You want this? Are you sure?" I saw a hand unpinning the brooch and carefully tucking the point away before it was handed to me. It was made from enamel with coloured glass inexpertly mounted on the wings, a bit of pretty rubbish really, but it was the only thing I wanted. Whatever had happened to that brooch? I drifted through her room slowly, examining everything until the sky began to darken. The room had felt tranquil whilst the sunlight had flooded it, but as the shadows began to grow I started to feel unsettled. As a child I had been afraid of the dark. Maybe those feelings were resurfacing because I had been a child the last time I was in here. Whatever the reason, I left the room and locked the door back up again. I didn't sleep well that night. I woke often, plagued by nightmares, and was unable to settle again until I gave in to my old fears and turned on a lamp. In one dream, I was unlocking the door to grandma's room and there was a scuffing sound from within. I opened the door just in time to see something crawl under the bed. It was dragging a pair of malformed, not-quite-human feet behind it. In another, I was trying to open the wardrobe door but I couldn't. It didn't feel as though the door was locked, but more like someone was holding it closed from the inside. When I did finally open it my first action was to plunge my hand in between the hanging dresses. I felt something cold and papery and lumpy that might have been a face. It split open in the seconds before I woke, and I felt teeth against my fingertips. The final dream had grandpa in it. He looked as he did the moment before he died, but he was standing in front of grandma's door, barring the way. He was unresponsive, his face blank and inanimate, eyes lifeless. I could not bring myself to move him. My nightmares lingered the next day, and it was hard for me to unlock the door to grandma's room. There was a feeling of foreboding quite aside from the normal trepidation I'd felt the first time. I heard no noises, saw no horrible creature scrabble beneath her bed, and, as I'd left the curtains open the day before, sunlight dispelled any shadows. It was a pleasant room, and I relaxed once I was inside. Dreams were my mind's way of sorting through information, and I couldn't let them affect me. I started my work slowly, emptying grandma's wardrobe one dress at a time. I folded each one with reverence. Even though I remembered little of her, she deserved as much respect as grandpa had. There were fur coats wrapped in plastic, and I didn't know what to do with them. I went through the pockets of each before putting them in a separate box. I found a handkerchief in one, a spent lipstick tube and an old penny in another. She had many handbags too, and I found more outdated currency in there. In a small, sequined evening bag I found a tiny key, and set it aside in case I found what it belonged to. Around lunch time, some family members came by to help. For whatever reason, I found myself locking up Grandma's room and pocketing the key, unwilling to let them into our secret. And it did feel like a secret. We hefted boxes and loaded cars together, but all the while I was wishing they would leave so I could carry on my exploration. I slept in the narrow bed in the little room I'd adopted since grandpa had become ill. I hadn't slept easy since I'd ventured into Grandma's room, though I had always slept well before. I had black nightmares, full of terror and confusion that would wake me up in a sweating mess. I started to sleepwalk, something I hadn't done since I was a child. I often woke up trying to turn the handle to my grandma's room, and would run back to my own bed in childish terror. When I woke up, I would wash and dress and eat breakfast, then go back into her room as if those dreams had never happened. I cleared her room slowly and painstakingly. I was looking for the tawdry butterfly brooch that grandma had once given me, on the off-chance it had found its way back to her room. It had a familiar yet uncomfortable association that wouldn't leave me alone. I'd dreamed about that brooch. It had been a bad dream, but much more innocent than the others: I'd dreamed about wearing the brooch on my t-shirt, and someone unpinning it. Grandpa had been the one to unpin it. He had seen me wearing it and his face had clouded for a second, something dark behind his eyes. "Did your grandma give you that?" I felt scared. I thought he was accusing me of stealing it, and I started to cry. He picked me up. Kissed my forehead and patted my back. But he took the brooch off me nevertheless. I felt terrible in the dream. As though I'd disappointed him, and I never wanted to disappoint Grandpa. He laughed and squeezed me tight. Called me a silly sausage. Told me I hadn't done anything wrong. But it didn't help. I had evidently done something wrong. It was right there on his face. There were raised voices. I was alone. I stood outside a closed door, listening, the doorknob far above my head. What had I done and why was Grandpa angry? I left grandma's jewellery box till last. Everything else had been labelled and packed, but I hadn't been able to put that away yet. I'd been half hoping the butterfly brooch would suddenly appear in there if I looked often enough. I don't know why I wanted it so much. Maybe just to validate my memory. I packed the jewellery box with the rest of the heirlooms. I was exhausted. I wanted nothing more to do with my grandma's room. It was stripped bare, aside from the large items of furniture, and the British Heart Foundation were coming tomorrow to take those away. I was done. "We don't take mattresses." I was haggard from lack of sleep, and as far as I was concerned the man could have been speaking a foreign language. He must have seen my confusion, because he elaborated. "We'll take the bed frame, but you'll have to dispose of the mattress yourself. Not hygienic. People won't buy a used mattress." I shrugged. "Okay. Take the rest then. I'll deal with what's left." He nodded. I turned aside and went to my little room with its narrow bed. I had no wish to see these strangers tramping through my grandpa's home, stripping it of everything I had ever known, peeling it back to an ordinary house. I heard the men bantering as they moved the furniture, laughing amongst themselves, talking about what they'd watched on TV the night before. They didn't mean any harm, but their levity was grating. It was only when it came to moving grandma's old bed frame that the chatter stopped. A man came to my room and knocked on my door. "Excuse me? There's something you missed when you were clearing out. Some kind of box. I thought you might want it." I opened the door. The man held a large wooden box, inset with a tiny brass keyhole. It looked expensive, almost definitely an antique, and I admired his honesty. "It was under the bed in the flowery room," he said. "Couldn't see it unless you crawled under there to be honest. Looks important though." I thanked him in earnest, thinking about his words as I closed the door on the clamour that had restarted. It had been under my grandma's bed, and I couldn't have seen it unless I'd crawled under. Hmm. Of course my mind returned to my dreams, and the thing which had scuttled under my grandma's bed. But it also returned to a tiny key I recalled finding. In a pocket? A handbag? What had I done with that? The men had been forbidden to take any box marked with an X, and after they had gone I ventured out and began to search. It was in one of the boxes, I was sure. I dug through each one as efficiently as I could, taking care not to disrupt the order I had created. There were countless odd receptacles in each box, any one of them possibly containing the key to the polished wooden box in my room, but twilight reached me before I found my prize, and I ate a solemn, solo dinner before retiring for the night. I read a book, on a mattress on the floor of "my" room, by the light of a bare bulb, before finally falling asleep. The dream I had that night was just as disturbing as all the others, if not more. In it, I was searching the house for the key still, rummaging through boxes upon boxes, but in each one all I found was knitted baby booties, filled to the brim. Every box I emptied made my anxiety grow, but I persevered, piling the booties in a corner of my grandma's room until they nearly reached the ceiling. Just before I woke up, I found myself spiralling through the bare rooms, frantic at all the empty boxes, but there was one in my grandpa's room I hadn't opened. This was probably due to the figure crouched beside it, a hunched over thing that might have been an item of furniture but which I somehow knew it was not. And although I very much wanted to look in that final box, I didn't want to go near its apparent guardian. When I woke up, grandpa's room was the first place I went. It was full of boxes waiting to be distributed amongst the family, but there was one in the corner I recognised from my dream. There was no hunched figure crouched beside it, but I still felt uneasy when I approached. This box was labelled "?", which was what I'd put on anything that wasn't immediately identifiable, and I started to sift through the contents. It was the work of a few minutes to find the tiny key, which I had sealed into an envelope marked "Keys". I had labelled so many things whilst clearing the house it was no wonder I didn't quite recall labelling this one. I took the key back to my room and unlocked the box. There was no ceremony to it. I might have been about to uncover a deeply hidden family secret, but there was no thunder and lightning to accompany my discovery. The box was full of newspaper, yellowed and fragile with age. It wasn't preserved for any historical reason, as it was all crumpled up, not folded. It looked more like it was there to serve as packing material. I dug down into the box, pulling out the newspaper. I was expecting documents, or photos, or an old diary entry or two, but it won't surprise you much that I discovered an old brooch nestled in the bottom. I found I wasn't surprised either. Part of me had expected it. What I hadn't expected, however, was that the brooch did not depict a butterfly, as I remembered. It was vaguely butterfly shaped, with wings, and the colour scheme was familiar enough that I recognised it, but whatever creature it had been created to resemble was not anything I had seen in nature. It was just as garish and crude as I remembered, but the clumsiness of its design seemed deliberate rather than due to lack of skill: despite being a physical object, the lines blurred together in an odd optical illusion so that no matter how much I stared at it, it never quite came into focus, and seemed to change whenever I turned it. I put the brooch in my pocket. Family members would be arriving soon to move boxes, and I didn't want them to see the brooch. Also, looking at it gave me a curiously queasy feeling, as though I were about to get a migraine. We worked all day. At the end of it, the house was empty but for my belongings and my mattress, and my mother asked if I would be going home. She had assumed I would, but I did not want to. I felt like there was unfinished business here. One more night. I was so tired I fell asleep without difficulty. I had looked at the brooch again before turning out the light, but couldn't make any more sense of it. I left it on the narrow ledge of the windowsill next to me and drifted back into the familiar realm of my troubled dreams. "You want this? Are you sure?" I was little again, sat on grandma's lap. The jewellery box was open on my own lap, forgotten. The brooch on her dress was far more fascinating. I had remembered this part, but there was more that I hadn't, and it rolled out obligingly for me now. "Choose something else, darling," said Grandma. "This is for grownups." "I want that!" My tears had been easy. I wasn't used to Grandma telling me "No". "Please, Lily. Anything else. Anything you want." There had been more cajoling, but I had been an expert manipulator as a child, and I could sense Grandma's resolve weakening. I sulked and pouted and begged and cried until she caved in, but even then there was hesitation as she unpinned the brooch. " You could have chosen anything," she said. "But here. It's yours." I clutched it in my fist, gazing with fascination at the funny face the thing had. "Butterfly!" "Uh. Yes. Butterfly. Pretty butterfly. Come on now, Lily. Would you like a cake? Grandma has baked some…" My mother, looking horrified when I showed her. "Oh my God, mum! Why has she got that monstrosity? Lily, give it back - it's ugly!" But I would not give it back. It was mine. I had won it through determination. My grandmother hung her head. "She wanted it," she said. Grandpa spotted it next. He looked angry. I thought he was angry at me for nagging Grandma, but he was kind to me. Unpinned the brooch, took it away. I followed him discreetly and listened at Grandma's bedroom door as they argued within, the doorknob far above my head. Their voices were muffled but I could make out the odd word. "You don't hurt family!" Grandpa was saying. "Hilda, I love you! But not Lily. She's a child. We said no children. And not family!" More indistinct words. It sounded like my grandmother was crying. "... I'm so tired… asked for it…. Begged…" I put my cheek against the door to listen closer, clumsy little kid skull bonking off the wood, and the voices inside stopped abruptly. " Did you hear that?" I didn't wait to see if either of them had. I ran away, into the garden, to play with my cousins. I remembered all of it now, but still none of it made sense. I think I was awake. I could feel the pillow beneath my head, the covers on top of me. There was even a tickle in my nose that had been a constant companion since starting all the dusty work I had done. I had to be awake. But my bedroom door was open, when I knew I had closed it. From where I was lying I had a clear view down the hall. Nearest, and to the left was Grandma's room. Then Grandpa's room. Straight ahead was the bathroom, and to the right the stairs. There was a broad stripe of moonlight cutting across the bannister from the small window by the stairs, and it hit Grandma's bedroom door with unnerving accuracy. I had shut her door and locked it, a ritual I never neglected. And I was glad I had, because in the depths of the customary night time silence I thought I heard the creak of boards in her room. I closed my eyes. Tried to go back to sleep. There might have been the merest judder of the floor beneath my mattress, transferred from the long boards that made up the top floor of the house, but that was likely just my imagination. I listened to my own breathing. It was loud inside my head, and very nearly blotted out the noise which was becoming more noticeable the more I ignored it. A dragging sound. The sound of something that wanted to be heard, but was pretending it didn't. A crafty noise, a sniggering under the breath. Slow and laborious, and getting closer. I thought of old childhood songs, hymns I had sung when I was little inside a large echoing room where we had assembly. We'd been taught kiddy Christian songs, about Jesus being a light and how Autumn reminded us of God. I tried to remember the words. Anything rather than acknowledge what I was hearing. It was louder now. More insistent. It sounded like the door handle to Grandma's room was rattling. I didn't open my eyes, because I didn't want to see if I was right. And anyway, the door was locked. No point in ruining my sleep and seeing something upsetting but harmless. Autumn days when the grass is jewelled and the silk inside a chestnut shell, jet planes waiting in the air to be refuelled, all these things I love so well. So I mustn't forget. Not I mustn't forget. To say a great big Thank you, I mustn't forget. The next verse had mentioned bacon, I was sure of it. The smell of bacon. I didn't want to hear what I heard: The door I had locked opening with a scream of complaining hinges that almost sounded human. The thud of something soft hitting the floor. I opened my eyes then. It was a mistake. There was a fat shadow outside Grandma's room, part of it obscured by the doorway. It had no real form, but it undulated where it lay, hunching up into a rounder shape. It reminded me of a cocoon, as if something was struggling inside to get out. A thin outer membrane bulging from within. It pulled itself from the doorway, and now I had seen it I was powerless to look away. I couldn't even close my eyes. I saw all of it, in whatever form it chose to show The end of it tapered into something that could have been legs, although they tapered into points that in no way resembled feet. There were small nubs there, but they waved in the air uselessly as it shuffled along on bent, sharply angular joints that might have been knees. It started to pull itself along the bare boards, unsheathing claws from the folds of itself, digging them into the wood and dragging its body forward. Scrape by scrape, it was coming towards me. Was this sleep paralysis? It made sense. I'd heard all about it, and it certainly fit the description. I couldn't move, and I was seeing something that couldn't possibly have been there. As it got closer, I could hear the raspy sounds of its breath. It was damp and bubbly, choked and phlegmy. It sounded like it was drowning, and I wished it would do so before it reached me. A face was becoming visible under the cowl of skin or cloth hanging over the front of the thing, but I had no wish to see it. It crawled with steady menace, broaching the threshold of my room and not stopping till it was within touching distance. I could not close my eyes, but I willed them to unfocus. There were tiny muscles I was still able to command, and I used them, blurring the face getting close to mine. Letting my gaze drift. It smelled like mould and old spunk and wet dust. If cobwebs had a smell we could detect, they would smell like this, I thought. A scaly hand touched my arm, scrabbled across my chest. It had a weight that belied its skeletal appearance. It used that hand to heave itself on top of me, and I let my eyes roll back into my head. I did not want to see it's face. I felt its bulk settle against my ribs. A pressure like a cement block crushing my lungs. It was panting now, breath that should have been hot but was icy cold stinging the skin of my face. I thought about the smell of bacon as it fastened its lipless mouth over mine and started to suck. I must have passed out, or fallen asleep. Or switched to another dream. I don't quite know which reality was true. I was dazed and lightheaded when I came to myself, sucking in air with a pair of lungs that felt flat and rubbery and stupid. I couldn't take a deep enough breath to satisfy me. The thing was gone, if it had ever been there, but in its place I felt a gentle pressure near my feet that was enough to make me crane my head towards it. There was a man sitting on my mattress, legs folded awkwardly, but I felt no fear. I recognised my Grandpa from photos in which he was younger. He looked very sad. "I'm sorry, Lily," he told me. "I tried to get rid of it, but she wouldn't let me. I wanted to hide it better, but I didn't know I was going to get ill so quickly." I tried to sit up, but I was so weak my arms collapsed underneath me. I heard Grandpa click his tongue in sympathy. "Poor girl," he said. "It's not pleasant, I know. She told me all about it. Decades, it followed her. Sometimes she could get rid of it for years, other times only days. Wore her out." He patted my leg. I could feel it through my blanket. "She never meant to pass it to you. We had an agreement: No kids, no family. She swore. But she got tired." He leaned over, and I managed to raise my head enough to see him. His eyes were wet, but whilst they offered empathy there was no real help there. "I can't stay long. They'll notice I'm gone. But get yourself some oxygen. You'll need it in the mornings. Take a sip or two when you wake up. It's yours now, so take it as much as you can. Pass it on if you feel you're able. You probably won't feel like you can now, but a few years down the line you might change your mind. It weighs on the soul, she said. " I wanted to speak. I wanted to ask him so much more, but I didn't have the energy. And he was looking scared now. "I have to go. They're looking for me. I'm so sorry, Angel. Just remember what I said. His emblem guides Him. He has to follow. But he always returns once the soul has gone. Sleep right, Lily the Pink." He left then. Left in an unimpressive fizzle of air occupying the space where he had been. And I was alone with a new dilemma. So far, I have decided that I will take the creature for as long as I can. After that, who knows? Somebody has to own it. Update: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/vxwdgf/when_my_grandfather_died_i_accidentally/ submitted by /u/withywoodwitch to r/nosleep [link] [comments]

Hey all, My unit isn't footing the bill for cold weather sleeping system and I'm looking for how to stay warm in the field. Not getting too cold, I don't expect to go below 0°, I was thinking of using [this](coleman 0°f mummy sleeping bag for big and tall adults | north rim cold-weather sleeping bag https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009PUSO4/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_YK2G96NQFD4Q8K7T1S54) sleeping bag from Coleman, it seems like it would fit in the bivvy sack. Any pointers for a sleeping bag would be nice. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/skankstro to r/USMC [link] [comments]

Here's the Charley Project page if you just want a quick overview. https://charleyproject.org/case/aaron-cody-stepp This was originally written as an audio script, apologies for any typos I missed while converting it. Edit: Here's a quick overview of who's who since some people were getting confused: Cody Stepp was three when he officially vanished, he went by his middle name, Cody, but his first name was Aaron. His aunt was Mickey who he'd been living with. Cody's mother and Mickey's sister, was named Robin. Janice Stiles was Cody's grandmother, and the mother of Mickey and Robin. Mickey and Robin were in their twenties, I'm not sure of Janice's exact age. When this all began, Robin was in jail, and Cody was living with Mickey and Janice, who had already been living together. Hope that clears things up! ​ Three year old Aaron Cody Stepp lived on Hosack st in the neighborhood known as Hungarian village in Columbus Ohio. While Columbus is one of the safer cities in Ohio, as it’s diversified economy held the population steady through the rust belt decline, there are still areas where one would not want to walk around alone at night. Hosack street, which lies in between the notoriously dangerous Parsons ave, and an abandoned cement factory off of south high, is definitely one of these places. Cody, who preferred to go by his middle name, had been living with his aunt, Mickey, since January of 1994, and Mickey had had legal custody of him since December of 1996. His mother, Robin had lost custody of him because she was in and out of jail. She struggled with addiction, occasionally worked as a prostitute, and had a history of petty theft and armed robbery charges. She had never been abusive towards Cody, but according to the Columbus Dispatch she “had not paid much attention” to him. On march 11th at around 7pm, Mickey decided to take a trip to the corner store to buy a bag of chips, while Cody was playing in the adjacent yard of 220 Hosack st. The family had, until recently, lived in the house next door, and it was currently vacant, so Cody wasn’t disturbing anyone by playing in the yard. Mickey’s mother, Janice Stiles, lived with Cody and Mickey as well, and when Mickey left to go to the store, the two had some kind of miscommunication. Mickey thought that Janice was going to watch Cody in the yard, while Janice thought that Mickey was taking him to the store with her. Mickey was gone for less than half an hour, but by the time she got back to the house, Cody was gone. They reported him missing, and perhaps coincidentally, Robin was scheduled to get out of prison the following morning. She was released at approximately 8:30 am, and had been in for 17 months on theft charges. She hadn’t seen Cody in over a year, and was crushed to hear that he was gone. She was also somewhat suspicious of Mickey and Janice’s story right off the bat. One of her friends sons’ James Taylor, took her to Mickey’s house right away. He later told police that Mickey and Robin had quickly gotten into an argument. The next day on March 12th Columbus Police thought they’d solved the case rather quickly, when a young boy about Cody’s age and matching his description was seen wandering around near Campus. However when they picked the boy up, it wasn’t Cody, and they brought him in to social services to find his family. The search for Cody continued with helicopters circling the city and K9 officers assisting in checking nearby fields and wooded areas. The FBI joined in right away, and CPD pulled out all the stops in the search. They brought in all available patrol officers, detectives, and even recruits to help. They went door to door to interview everyone in the neighborhood, handed out flyers and checked alleyways, while a team of nearly 100 officers combed through the vast wooded area running along the nearby scioto river. Though police initially told the media they were treating the case as an abduction, within the first few days they told reporters that they hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Cody was missing as the result of a family dispute between Robin and Mickey, quickly connecting the dots that it was a bit odd he vanished right before Robin might get him back. On March 13th 1997 the Columbus Dispatch reported that a neighbor had seen Mickey and Janice removing items from their backyard shed at around 6:45, but they hadn’t seen Cody outside at all. This was at most 15 minutes before Mickey said he was outside. Other neighbors pointed out that it wasn’t the best neighborhood, and it would have been a bit odd for him to be playing outside in a neighbor's lawn because of the large amount of drug dealers and prostitutes who wandered the streets. On March 15th Robin was back in jail after soliciting an undercover officer with the offer of prostitution at around 7:30 in the morning, just blocks away from Mickey’s residence on Hosack st. Later articles gradually lowered the amount she had offered to sleep with the officer for, perhaps in a bid to further sensationalize the story, even though the only paper that covered the story in the first few days was the Columbus Dispatch. The judge granted Robin a low bail amount, but her charges were complicated by the fact that she had already had arrests in relation to prostitution that had not yet been brought to court. Police emphasized to the media that her arrest didn’t have anything to do with the case or the search, and Lieutenant David Murray said that all leads so far had been dead ends. He clarified that even though police were looking at the possibility of a family abduction, the Stepp family had all been very cooperative in the search. March 19th brought about another search of the property next to where Cody had been staying with his aunt. Police had apparently searched the shed the night of the abduction, but needed to obtain a warrant to go back and search it more thoroughly since that house was now vacant. Detective Steve Murray told the Dispatch that "We just wanted to recheck the shed to make sure the little boy wasn't in there,". Murray was quickly becoming the voice of the case to the media, and once again said they didn’t have anything they could point to or rule out. He said "Leads continue to come in and take us in every possible direction, and we follow them all up. But we can't say we have enough leads in any one direction to exclude any other directions. It's frustrating. We want to find him. But this is the nature of investigations. You look until you find him. You have to stay calm, focused and moving. You don't want to get too frustrated or too eager because you don't want to miss anything." The case went silent for a month, only making it into the papers again on April 19th to update the public on Robin’s prostitution charges. She pleaded not guilty. The case went cold once again, this time until August when America’s most wanted aired the story. Local police took the opportunity to ask the public for help, saying that it wasn’t too late to come forward. Detective Mark Annen said "There has to be people out there who were initially afraid to call us, and maybe they thought we would find him. But time has passed, and that hasn't happened. We need their help, and we are asking them to call us. They can call anonymously." He said that the police had received numerous calls lately about another boy abducted by the name of Cody, but re-assured the public that it was a coincidence, and that boys named Cody were not being targeted for abductions. The police had searched three houses in town based off of local tips, but none of them had panned out. Apparently these tips pointed to Copy being deceased, because Anenn said he thought it was fortunate they didn’t find him in any of those locations. The Dispatch called Robin, who was currently incarcerated, to ask her what she thought, and she told them that "I think a family member or a friend of the family has my son," She went so far as to speculate that he’d been taken across state lines. She said that her family had made complaints about her to children’s services, and didn’t think she was a fit mother for Cody. She told the Dispatch that "I love my son more than anything in the world, and I want him back. Cody was the best gift I ever got in my life. I want him to know that Mommy loves him and misses him, and I want him home." She also said she was taking classes at jail to help her from falling back into addiction, and when she got out in the fall she planned on focusing on finding her son. On July 12th of 1997 a witness reportedly spotted a child matching Cody’s description at a restaurant in Bellefonte Pennsylvania. He was with two other children, and two adult women. One woman was white, around 30 or 40 with medium length brown hair, the other was asian with short dark hair, and in her teens or perhaps early twenties. The women and children have not been identified, and if the sighting was indeed Cody, nothing ever came of it. By this time Cody had been gone for months, and police were strongly considering that Mickey had given him to another relative to keep him away from Robin, as she thought she was an unfit mother. While emotionally devastating, and obviously illegal, this could have meant Cody was alive and being cared for. However, a closer examination of Mickey stepp and Janice Stiles brought much more disturbing possibilities to light. With more neighbors talking to police, it became clear that they hadn’t actually seen Cody in months. The last confirmed sighting was in May of 1996. When police searched Mickey’s home, they found only a few childs clothing items, and no toys or pictures, or really any evidence to show that he had actually been living there. However, Cody had been at a doctor’s appointment a few weeks prior to get some vaccinations, so police double checked that to make sure he had actually been spotted. What they found out was that Mickey had brought a neighbor’s kid over for the night under the guise of having a sleepover with Cody, and taken that child in to pass off as Cody at the appointment the next morning. This all points to Cody being gone long before Robin came back to get him, and she hadn’t even seen him since December of 1995 well over a year before he supposedly vanished. When she talked to Mickey or Janice over the phone they would say that Cody was busy or with a friend and couldn’t speak with her. Neighbors and friends recalled anytime they were at the Stepp household, Mickey would always say that Cody was at a friends house or playing in the backroom. Still, there could be hope that Mickey simply gave him away to a relative, and Robin told police they had family in West Virginia and kentucky. On March 1st of 1998, Columbus Police Told the media that they believed Cody could very well be dead. They said Mickey had failed two lie detector tests, Janice refused to take one, and both women had stopped cooperating with law enforcement all together. Robin on the other hand had passed one, but it’s important to note that polygraphs are not very accurate, and often just serve to sway public opinion for, or against a suspect. Despite her extensive criminal record, police were always supportive of Robin in the media. Mark Annen said "This is a mother who wants her child back. She has shown the concern a parent would have with a missing child, and she has helped us as much with the investigation as she can.” The police never brought up her charges or time served, and only commented on it when the media made a sensation of it, as CPD tried to keep the focus on finding Cody. As police kept digging, they found more possible evidence against Mickey and Janice. Jim McCosky, one of the leads on the case told the Columbus Dispatch that Janice may have had a history of child abuse. Stiles had had a child pass away in 1964. Her youngest daughter Tennie had died at the age of three from pneumonia caused by bronchitis. However an autopsy of her body showed that she was covered in burns in various stages of healing, meaning the burns did not all happen at once. An unnamed female relative told McCosky that when she was young, Janice would place Tennie on the hot stove as a punishment for when she had accidents during potty training. McCosky said "Tennie also was placed on a potty for eight to 10 hours at a time.” This relative also told police that before she died Tennie was sick in bed for days before she was brought in for medical treatment. Stiles was never charged with murder or neglect in regards to Tennie, and officers today are not sure why. McCosky and Annen were becoming less and less hopeful that Cody would be found alive, but they did their best to keep his story in the media, checking in every now and then for updates. Annen told the media that they believed the public had answers, and told the Dispatch ``Someone out there knows what has happened to Cody. It's coming up on a year, and we are asking for the public's help. Calls can be made anonymously." In the spring of 1998 Robin began filing paperwork to have Cody declared legally dead. Robin was trying to prove that Cody had been exposed to the peril of death, a specific type of ruling typically used for boat and plane accidents where a body could not possibly be recovered. The media was quick to assume this was in order to file a wrongful death suit with Mickey, though Cody did not have a life insurance policy and Robin had not attempted to recover any financial compensation. This was reported on specifically in the Columbus Dispatch, and it’s possible this was just the dispatch speculating that she was trying to get money from the case, as they tended to portray her in a negative light. On August 24th of 1998 Robin went before the probate court with her lawyer Michael Moore. Judge Lawrence Belkis quickly ruled that the witness testimony was largely speculation and said "At this point we don't know if the child is missing, sold for ransom or murdered or fell down a sewer drain," He ruled that there was not enough evidence to declare Cody dead. But after the ruling he had the witnesses come forward and testify about what they knew, so the transcript from the witnesses who were already present could be used in any appeals down the line. The hearing lasted another four hours while twelve witnesses testified on the case. Columbus Police testified that they had reason to believe that Cody may have died, but had to admit that they had no evidence to back up that idea. Mickey said she felt responsible for Cody’s disappearance, but maintained that she had been trying to find him ever since. However, she told the court that when he vanished Cody was wearing a jogging suit in 28 degree weather, and didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that. Moore brought up the possibility that Janice and Mickey had conspired to get rid of Cody in order to collect and spend the $279 welfare checks that they had been receiving for him. They both denied this, and maintained that Cody had been in the home up until he vanished. Moore brought up Tennie Stepp, and Janice denied ever abusing her children, but her daughter Diane Carls took the stand to refute this. Diane said that Janice had tortured Tennie before her death, and was abusive to the other children. She said Janice “had a temper. She'd pick up whatever was close and throw it at you,". Diane told the court that Janice had once beaten her unconcious. They called the nurse who had supposedly given Cody his shots weeks prior to his disappearance, and she testified that she had since been introduced to a boy who was the son of Mickey’s friends Rebecca Hunt, and was about 80% sure that this had been the boy Mickey brought in disguised as Cody. Lastly, Robin told the jury she had not seen or spoken to her son since December of 1995, and it was very possible Cody had been missing a majority of the time she was incarcerated. Because the last confirmed sighting of him was in May of 1996, and that was the year Mikey had gotten formal custody of him, it's possible he vanished very shortly after she succeeded in becoming his guardian. Though evidence does point to Cody having been gone from that house for quite some time, it’s important to note that later articles will say there was absolutely no childrens clothing found in the house, while initial reports simply say there was very little. The fact that neither Robin nor Janice saw a problem with Cody playing in a neighbor's yard in below freezing weather with simply a light jacket to keep him warm, does open up the possibility that Cody had indeed been there, but was simply not being taken care of. The lack of toys and pictures don’t necessarily mean he was already gone, perhaps they just didn't buy him any toys or see fit to hang any pictures or buy him new clothes. On June 24th of 1999 Robin appealed the court's decision. During this trial, it was revealed that Janice had at one point admitted to being in 220 Hosack st while Mickey was at the corner store, before she went back to their house, meaning that if Cody had been playing in the yard she would have noticed him, and would have noticed that Mickey was gone when she went back to 214 Hosack st. This seems to put holes in Janice’s story, but proving that the opposition was unreliable would not necessarily sway the judge. The ruling that they had chosen to pursue was not normally granted to people who had been gone for less than five years, or who weren’t part of an accident in which there were no survivors. But if they could prove that Cody had been “exposed to the specific peril of death” they might win, and be able to take legal action against Mickey and Janice. There was precedent for this ruling, in 1984 a hiker from Ohio had gotten lost in Katmai National park while on vacation in Alaska, and his family took his life insurance company to court to try and close his estate.They won on the grounds that his backpack had been found in a river, and there was a park ranger who came down to testify that if he had fallen in the river, he could not have survived, and even if he didn’t, he was in a hostile environment without any supplies, and had likely been gone long enough to perish. Going off of this same idea, Moore had based his appeal on “Cody’s potential exposure to the cold weather on March 11, 1997, his extreme vulnerability as a lost three-year-old on the south side of Columbus, and the inference that he lived in an abusive home environment.” However, the court reviewed the transcript from August and said that there was not any tangible evidence to suggest that Cody had been exposed to extreme danger. In the case of the missing hiker that they tried to use as precedent, his backpack had been found. In order for Cody’s case to have similar evidence, they would need to have either found something of his in the area, or have a witness who had seen him talking to a suspicious person. The fact that he was not properly dressed for the weather, and that Janice had a history of abuse were not enough evidence. The previous judgement was affirmed. In 2004 Mickey Stepp passed away, and she had maintained her innocence, and her mothers innocence until she died. On March 11th of 2007 the Columbus Dispatch ran a ten year piece about Cody’s case. They interviewed Jim McCosky who still keeps a box of evidence about the case, and he adds to it if any new leads ever come in. When asked about what he thought happened to Cody, McCosky said "Cody could have been given away. He could have literally been sold. Do I definitely know, is he dead? No, I don't." McCosky has gotten a few leads over the years, oftentimes in response to sightings that match a new age progression picture of Cody, but none have panned out. Although the initial, more optimistic theory was that perhaps Mickey had given Cody away to someone to raise him, in order to hide him from Robin, as she viewed her as an unfit mother, McCosky doesn't really find this plausible anymore. He told the Dispatch that he would guess “"He's dead, or he was sold into a culture like a pornography culture." On September 17th of 2008 Police responded to a tip about Cody’s body being buried in a field off of Parson’s avenue, near where Cody had been staying with Mickey. They had unspecified reasons to believe the tip could be reliable, and set up a tent to work from. Police had a cadaver dog search the field, and he found four areas of interest. Police dug about an inch of dirt at a time away from all areas, but the dog only continued to alert on one of the spots after the surface dirt was removed. They dug fairly deep with a backhoe in this spot, but unfortunately did not find anything except some buried trash. Police had apparently known about the field since March, but had to wait until the rainfall had stopped enough to excavate the area, as it was a swamp. Police didn’t rule out the possibility of returning for another search, but eventually they stopped for the day. Robin observed the search, and told reporters that she is not ready to believe her son is dead. She said "I believe he's alive and waiting to come home," On December 24th of 2007 a user by the name of Linda Fox posted about an in depth sighting she believes she’d had of Cody. The comment was in response to a blog post about the case and began with the sentence “I have reason to believe Cody is alive and living near or in Lebanon, Ohio. I picked up a small boy who looked to be around 9 on Dec 12th on my way home from choir practice. He was about 3 miles east of Lebanon, walking towards Lebanon”. She then went on to describe that Cody seemed tired from walking a long time, and he told her he was meeting a friend, or possibly a cousin named Jeremy at the nearby McDonalds. He’d been walking in the rain, and was wearing a coat that seemed too big for him. On the way there they talked, and he told Linda that he was 13, and being homeschooled. His friend never showed up so Linda bought him some food and they talked for a bit, before she offered to drive him home. He couldn’t tell her his address or even the street, but he said he would know how to get there. When she asked who he was living with, he told her he stayed with his aunt Donna, but he didn’t know what her last name was. He said that his was Erwin. They drove around for over half an hour, with Cody being unable to pinpoint exactly where he lived. Linda decided to take him to the police station, because the whole thing seemed odd, and she wanted to get him help. She stressed that he wasn’t in trouble, but when she went in to talk to the police officers, Cody fled. She told them he couldn’t be far, but they were unable to locate him that night. After this encounter, Linda searched for missing children from Ohio to see if perhaps he was a runaway, and someone was looking for him. She noticed that he matched the age progressed picture of Cody Stepp very closely, the same blond hair and blue eyes, but beyond that Cody had an unusually shaped left ear, with almost a notch at the top. The Cody she’d met had the same slightly odd left ear. After this, Linda took the trash that was in her car from the night before, the spoon and cup that Cody had eaten ice cream out of, and put them in a plastic bag. She brought them to the police station along with Cody’s missing poster. They assured her they would check for DNA and finger prints, but said that they had reason to believe the boy was likely just a local runaway. She called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as the Columbus Police, but doesn’t know if anything ever came of the lead. This account is certainly interesting, and if it’s true, Cody’s slightly oddly shaped left ear would be a good way to identify him. But it’s a comment on a blog, and this report does not appear in any newspaper sources that we could find. However, since the child vanished it’s of course within the realm of possibility it could have been him, and because this case is so sparsely reported on, her sighting would not necessarily have made the news. In 2012 investigators found a teenager in Kentucky whose full name was Aaron Cody Stepp. He was in the state where Robin thought he may have been taken to, and he even closely matched the age progression pictures of Cody. However, when investigators went to test his DNA, they found he wasn't a match. The case went cold again, briefly making the papers for the fifteen year anniversary in 2013, but there wasn’t any new information to discuss. On September 1st 2014 Columbus Monthly ran an article checking in with the most high profile cases in the state. A majority of the piece was spent discussing the Brian Shaffer case, arguably the most famous case in Columbus, but near the end, they talked with Robin. She said she thinks about Cody every day, and remembered his chubby cheeks, and how full of energy he always was. Robin had been clean for four years at this point, and was cautiously optimistic that they might still find her son. For most of the case Jim McCosky thought Cody was likely deceased, and that Mickey and Janice had something to do with it. But the two had both since passed away, and anything they might have known likey died with them. McCosky had since retired, and detective Robin Tucker had taken over the case. Tucker had a slightly more optimistic view, leaning towards Robin Stepp’s theory that Cody had been given away to family in either West Virginia or Kentucky. As of the time the article was written, detectives thought they had a promising new lead. Robin said “I hope it’ll be my son we find this time. I just want him found and brought home. It’s been too many years.” Two more years passed, and in 2016 ABC followed up with Robin on the 19 year anniversary of Cody’s disappearance. She stands by her theory that Mickey and Janice were responsible, saying "I believe that they sold him, or gave him away, or did something with him," Pamela Taylor, whose son had picked Robin up the day she got out of prison, had stayed Robin's friend throughout the years. She told ABC that she was hopeful that one day Robin could be reunited with her son, saying "There's no closure, there never will be until that day that we see him and I hope that it's here on earth," There is very little information on Cody’s case. At one point a discussion board on Project Jason, a website about missing children was up, and there were disturbing allegations made against Janice. However, the only source for this is a screenshot of the conversation on Reddit, the Project Jason website no longer exists, and the pages have not been archived. The allegations claimed that Janice raised her children in a matriarchal society, and claimed that boys were not important, favoring the girls over them. She also allegedly pimped out her daughters starting at the age of 12. These allegations cannot be substantiated, but on the few write ups and discussions that exist online, these same allegations are often mentioned to add more credence to the theory that Janice mistreated Cody. References to these allegations can be found in that same blog post from 2007 with the sighting provided by Linda Fox, and may have possibly stemmed from information provided in the America’s Most Wanted episode about Cody. An attempt to track down this episode was unsuccessful. However I did find a discussion board where one reddit user contacted Michael Linder, the creator of the show to ask about getting a hold of old episodes. He responded with "So sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but all episodes of America’s Most Wanted have escaped, their whereabouts unknown, after serving a 23-year sentence on Fox — which claims to have no idea where the masters are stored — or if they’ve been stored. Over the years I’ve tried to locate them with no success, as have many others including attorneys from the Exoneration Project who hoped specific episodes might assist in righting wrongful convictions. As you’ve probably discovered, a few bad dubs can be found on YouTube. That’s all that remains. The show does not stream, and collections of dubs have not been saved by the FBI or any law enforcement institution. It cannot be purchased. You can bang on Fox’s door, but many others have tried without success." Because of this, one of the few credible sources that may have had further information about this case is not available, and the masters have possibly been deleted. I filed a records request with the Franklin county probate court to try and obtain a transcript of the August 24th hearing where many of the allegations against Mickey and Janice were recorded, but they do not have the recording on file. The court documents about the case do not contain any new information, so the only source that we were able to find that contained anything about that four hour testimony was a short dispatch article spotlighting the more sensational evidence. National newspapers outside of Ohio didn’t really pick up the case, and Cody’s case remains unsolved with very little media attention. Robin Stepp still holds out hope that her son could be alive, but because the case hasn’t seen media attention in years, and not nearly enough people are keeping an eye out for Cody. If he is alive, Aaron Cody Stepp would be 27 today, and may not remember his old family. Perhaps detective McCosky is right, and Cody perished shortly after he vanished, whether that was in 1996 or in March of 1997. Or maybe Robin is right, and somewhere out there, in West Virginia or maybe Kentucky, or even Lebanon Ohio, there’s a young man who has no idea that he’s actually Aaron Cody Stepp, a missing boy from Columbus Ohio. If you have any information about Cody Stepp, please call the Columbus Police at 614-645-4670 Sources: The Charley Project STEP v STEP 06/24/99 court case The Columbus Dispatch (Most of the articles came from here but they’re all behind a paywall) NBC4 Columbus Monthly ABC6 The reddit thread referred to regarding the allegations against Janice The blog containing the lebanon sighting submitted by /u/TopGolfUFO to r/UnresolvedMysteries [link] [comments]

For those that are just tuning in: Mineral Wells is a small town in Texas where I’ve been working for 5 years as a police officer. It’s located somewhere north of interesting and south of scary as shit, where the citizens are strange, the events are stranger, and the past is never past. Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4gq26y/im_a_police_officer_in_a_small_town_in_texas_and/ Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4gvhir/im_a_police_officer_in_a_small_town_in_texas_and/ Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4h4xkn/im_a_police_officer_in_a_small_town_in_texas_and/ Back at my apartment, I sat alone underneath the single light illuminating my small dining table, head in my hands. I could still see the young girl's hollow eyes staring blankly back at me. I shuddered, reaching into the satchel on the table and slowly pulling out the 5 folders I had retrieved from the filing cabinet at the Norwood. They were legal sized, olive in color, and only slightly faded. They looked no different from any other folder you might come across at your office. What they signified, however, was something much more sinister and damning. I reached for one, but couldn’t bring myself to open it. I stared at them for a while before putting them back in the satchel and closing the flap. I was exhausted and terrified and I had had enough, at least for the night. In the morning, I still couldn’t bring myself to look at them. Something had happened to me the night before, the nature of which is hard to explain, but I’ll try. I felt dull, not as in uninteresting, but as if the bright and polished parts of me had been scratched off or rubbed away, leaving only raw and faded parts behind. Is that what depression feels like? I think it’s easy to pretend you know how you would react if you ever came face to face with a true ghost or spirit. I think what we see in movies and on television desensitizes us to how it would really feel if we experienced it ourselves. That type of terror is not something the mind can manage on its own, I’ll tell you that. The body takes over. Instinct, perhaps; something primal woven into our DNA. It leaves you changed, left me changed, anyway. It was probably almost a week before I mustered the courage to find out what was inside those folders. The first file appeared to be the file for a seven-year-old boy from South Carolina admitted for the treatment of his leukemia, referred to only as “Charlie”. I flipped through the pages until I found one with a “Surgical Notes” heading, entitled “Replantation of Severed Limb of Minor Child”. It went on to describe in detail a surgical procedure with the purpose of re-attaching the subject’s severed….hand? The words were technical in nature and I didn’t understand some of them: “…preparation of the stump included the shortening of both bones (radius\ulna) by 1 cm….” “…repair of the radial artery, ulnar nerve, and median nerve was attempted along with two veins, one on the volar aspect and one on the dorsum….” I skipped over to the next page and found at the bottom under “Surgical Outcome”: “Failure to re-attach hand.” Beside it, in a woman’s flowing script, something was scribbled: “Mother sent to M.S.” I shuddered at the thought of a seven year old losing a hand. But how had Charlie been admitted for Leukemia and ended up having his hand severed? Also, who was M.S.? Possibly Marianna? I flipped back two pages and found what I was looking for: “Preparation Notes: Clinician’s third attempt at attaching a child’s severed appendage. Subject, Charlie, was mildly sedated with heroin-hydrochloride and a given a local anesthetic at the right wrist, fully conscious. M. assisted with cleaver, severing the hand cleanly. Mother watched from the observation room.” I sat in shock as the realization crept in. I didn’t want to believe it. I quickly scanned through the other files, but found similar accounts of gruesome re-attachment surgeries, which confirmed what I already suspected: Marianna was cutting up children and then Dr. Norwood was attempting to put them back together again. The girl with the missing eyes, the nursery rhyme, the room upstairs, even what Victor had said, it all made perfect sense now. Dr. Norwood seemed to be practicing his surgery skills on unsuspecting children who had been admitted for unrelated diseases or ailments. What I didn’t understand was how he was getting away with it. Surely the parents didn’t stand by and watch their children get cut into pieces by his psychotic nurse. There was more to this, I knew, and I wouldn’t find it in these files. I shoved them away in disgust. Afterwards, the depression set in deeper and more fully. I still had a job to do, however, and that was protect the citizens of Mineral Wells, Texas. I tried to go about my usual work handling traffic accidents and other small crimes, the typical happenings of a small Texas town. At one point I think I was hoping that I would forget what had happened and could return to just being a police officer. Maybe then I would feel normal, whole again. But, as you obviously know by now, Mineral Wells had other plans for me. I heard one day about a young child from a prominent family in town who had suffered an accident while trying to operate a riding lawnmower (obviously without his parents’ permission). The blade had mangled his left arm, all the way up to the elbow, and it ended up having to be amputated. It was reported as a terrible tragedy. I must have been the only one that noticed, based on my close review of the picture the local newspaper ran of the model of mower the child had been injured by, that the child’s legs couldn’t even heave reached the pedal. There was also the curious case of Brad Delaney, city council president and member of the First United Methodist Church, who one night took the .45 he had hidden under the mattress and killed his wife in cold blood while she slept. One shot, right to the temple. Brad “confessed”, saying it must have been him that shot her, seeing as how it was his gun and no one else had been in the house, but he didn’t remember doing it. They had found him that morning, still asleep next to his murdered wife, the mattress stained in crimson red. One evening I responded to a report of an awful smell coming from a student’s room at Weatherford College’s Mineral Wells branch. The student had not been seen in several days and based on the smell coming from the room, the administration did not want to enter the room themselves, fearing at best a dead body and at worst foul play. The college was located on the old site of Fort Wolters, which had been a military installation during World War II. I had run across Fort Wolters in the historical archives and knew a little about it. At one point during the war, it had been the largest infantry replacement training center in the United States and several famous WWII soldiers had been trained there. I had run across several accounts of a solider, apparently afraid of being sent off to war, who committed suicide in the barracks and could be still be heard pacing the halls on the anniversary of his death. When I arrived, security led me to the student’s room. As reported, the smell was foul and appeared to be that of a decomposing body. The security guard unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open. That’s when I saw him. In the middle of the room, hanging from a fan by a bed sheet, was the student. His face was bruised and swollen and his eyes were bulging from his head, wide and red. A female student had passed by the room and screamed out, causing the security guard to frantically remove her from the vicinity, leaving me alone with the corpse. I looked around the room to find any sings of a struggle, but nothing else was amiss. That’s when I called the investigative unit to take over. I found out several days later about something odd one of the investigative officers had found and couldn’t explain. The entire room had been clean, with no books, papers, or clothes out of place, except for a single, folded piece of paper, found under the desk. The officers had thought it would be a suicide note, but the words written inside didn’t make any sense to them. They did to me: “I cannot go to war. I’m sorry Mother.” Camp Wolters Several weeks later, while at a coffee shop that I frequent (only bottled water, no coffee for me), I noticed a man several tables over staring at me. When a looked his way, he sort of flinched and acted like he had been looking somewhere else. I made a mental note of his appearance: 60ish years old, dark-haired, and wearing some kind of uniform. He was holding a cup of coffee and I could see that he hands were dirty and gnarled from manual labor. Not exactly the type of person who typically frequents a coffee shop. When I got up to leave, I could feel him watching me. Over the next several weeks, I saw the same man three more times, always far enough away to maintain his cover, but close enough to see what I was doing. I was pretty sure he was following me by that point, but honestly had no clue as to why. He seemed harmless enough, so I wasn’t frightened, just curious. I got the feeling he was sizing me up, if that makes any sense. One day, I awoke to a note tucked into the side of my door. I opened it and read the hastily scribbled words, written on the pack of a receipt from a local garage: “Coffee shop. 3pm.” I’ll admit, I was a little nervous this person knew where I lived, although it shouldn’t have been hard to follow me here. The coffee shop was a safe, public place, so I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t go. I had never pictured myself as the type of person that would respond dutifully to the instructions written in shady notes stuffed into my door frame. But the times, they were a-changing. And depression or not, it was time to get back to my investigation. I arrived at 3 to find my new “friend” seated in his usual spot. He saw me come in, A moment later, he was out of his seat and walking down the hallway at the back of the shop. I followed him, exiting out of the bad door the employees used for taking out the trash. He was standing there, lighting a cigarette, looking generally nervous and disheveled. “Want to tell me why you’ve been following me, Stan?” I started, probably sounding a bit more stern than I actually felt. I found that people tended to follow instructions better if you spoke to them by name, and the patch on his uniform had provided that information. “I just had to be sure. Mary told me you two had talked, but I wanted to make sure you were okay for myself.” he replied nervously. Mary Scott, I thought. He must be one of the “others” she had been talking about. Those that knew the truth about Mineral Wells. “And what did you find out by following me into a coffee shop?” I asked. “Well, for starters, all you drink is regular bottled water. No coffee or tap water. Also, I didn’t find any of the Crazy Water bottles outside in the trash at your apartment.” A) Creepy, B) Touché, I thought. This guy was smarter than he looked. “So what am I doing here?” I said. He threw down his cigarette. “Mary said you knew what was going on in Mineral Wells. Said you may be trying to do something about it.” I wasn’t sure I trusted him at this point and he could see it on my face. “Oh, don’t worry, I don’t drink it either. I’ve never touched the stuff. My father made sure I understood that.” “Who was your father?” “He was an orderly at the old Millings Sanitarium.” That damned place. “I know of it.” I said coldly. “I thought you should know what he told me about that place." He paused for a minute, then went on. " He said it was the scariest place he ever stepped foot in. He helped with patients, administered medicine, and cleaned the rooms, so he was familiar with the goings on. He told me about the different types of ‘treatments’ they would perform on the patients there: Electro-shock therapy, experimental surgeries, psychological experiments, sleep deprivation studies, even waterboarding. The screams were the worst part, he said. I know, they aren’t exactly the type of bedtime stories you should tell your children, but I don’t think he could help himself. He couldn’t sleep for most of his adult life and my mother died when I was young. The place was hellish, he said, but they always had an influx of new patients, regardless of how bad it was.” “Did he say anything about where all the patients came from?” “He pieced it together. When news got out about the mineral water, people came from far and wide to be treated. Bathhouses and spas were some of the main attractions for those with less serious ailments of the body, but Millings promised a cure for every dementia and psychological issue under the sun. So the people poured in. Most never left. Business was good. Oh, to be a worm in the peach tree.” “Worm in the peach tree?” I repeated. I hadn’t had that turn of phrase before. “Oh, it was just something my Dad used to say. It basically means someone is taking advantage of a situation.” “There were also back room deals with some of the other businesses in town.” he went on. “I think the Baker management would refer people to Millings, as most of the out-of-towners ended up there first. I also know that Dr. Norwood would sometimes send patients their way. My Dad was always the most curious about those patients, he said, because they always seemed to be pretty healthy people, at least when they first got there. They always screamed the loudest.” It suddenly got cold and dark where we were standing. I looked up to see the thunderheads rolling in. We’d have some weather tonight. I changed the subject. “How do you know Mary? And what is her part in all of this?” He looked like he was about to respond, then thought better of it. “You’ll have to ask her about that one.” The bitter, biting rain that began to fall cut off any further conversation between us. Early the next day, after my shift the previous night, I pulled out the files again; I had a hunch about something Stan had said. Plus, the middle of a thunderstorm is always the perfect time to read about sadistic shit. I found “Charlie’s” file and flipped to the page I was looking for. I found the hastily scribbled words again: “Mother sent to M.S.” It wasn’t a person. It was a place. Millings Sanitarium. Dr. Norwood had been sending the perfectly healthy parents of the children he was experimenting on to be experimented on themselves. I looked back through the children’s files and my other hunch was confirmed. All of the children were from out of town: South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. I finally got it. Imagine this: it’s the early 1900’s; there’s no television, social media, or cellphones. People keep in touch through letters, for Christ’s sake. Your child is terminally ill with cancer or some other illness, or perhaps it’s you that’s sick, and you’ve lost all hope. Until you hear about Mineral Wells, Texas, home of the Crazy Water that heals all that ails you. You’ll try anything. You pack up your bags and make the long journey to Texas. Once you're there, you'll try anything. And you're never heard from again. For it to work, the families would need to be from anywhere but Texas. Check. You’d need a network of conspirators to make sure all lose ends were tied up. Check. Dr. Norwood got the children and Millings got the parents or anyone else from the Baker who was dealing with a psychological infirmity. If anyone ever tracked you down at Millings, which would be nearly impossible, who would believe your crazy stories? By that time you’d be so drugged, emotionally scarred, or both, no one would dream of interrupting your “treatment”. Could law enforcement have been involved as well? The scope of it blew my mind. Think of all of the suffering and death. Think of those poor children. All because of some foul-smelling water, the hope-filled human spirit, and a group of doctors more sadistic than any you could ever imagine. Worms in the peach tree. Part 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4hvtis/im_a_police_officer_in_a_small_town_in_texas_and/ This series can now be found for free (or pay what you want) on ebook submitted by /u/thethingthatwaits to r/nosleep [link] [comments]