Corner of Bourbon & Division

Today has been A Day, and I still have to go to work in about five hours. *falls over* 

I cleaned out all the quail enclosures today, as I had been doing only very basic maintenance since getting Covid, and they were pretty gross. The quails deserve a nice clean environment to live in, after all. I also noticed that the quarantine box in which I was keeping my lone male was disintegrating because of the water spilling out of his water dish. The cardboard had softened without my noticing before, and last night I saw that the box was sagging to one side, and the mesh over the "window" in the front was gaping badly.

So today I cut a hole in a new box, lined it with duct tape and plastic, and cut a new window in it so the poor birb isn't just completely in the dark. I couldn't leave him in the old box while I transferred the mesh over, however, so I decided to stick him in for a couple of minutes with the other quail. How bad could it be? I thought. He'll only be in there long enough for me to attach the mesh to the new box. HAH. No sooner had his feet touched the pine chips on the floor of the enclosure, he immediately sprang onto the nearest female, grabbed a bunch of feathers at the base of her head and swung himself onto her back like a cowboy at a rodeo. He was VERY rough with her, and she bucked him off, so he immediately did the same thing to the next closest female. A third female then flew at him and started pecking at him pretty viciously, so I reached in and pulled him out and put him in a bucket while I worked.

Good Lord and butter!

At least now I know that he is, in fact, the problem bird in the bunch. The other male is very gentle with the ladies: all their feathers are growing back, they're all laying consistently every day, and they all like to hang out and tweedle softly together, whereas the first male has been screaming intermittently for the past couple of days. So once I am done with my night shifts he will be turned into dinner. Only gentleman birbs get to hang out with my ladies! Everyone else gets to be eaten.

I then sent my resume to the recruiter who'd asked for it, and then it was time to gather all the pets to take them to the vet for their annual shots. I want to say it went smoothly, but that would be a lie. First off, Octavia decided to hide in the walls and refused to come out. I was able to get Juno in her carrier, and then the dogs freaked the fuck out, because CAAAAAAAAT! I wrangled all three into KK's car and got them to the vet, figuring I would just reschedule Octavia for another day.

Once at the vet, the dogs got their shots, and KK messaged me to tell me that Octavia had graced the living room with her presence. I asked her to put Octavia in her kennel and arranged to leave Juno at the vet's while I drove the dogs home and picked up my truant cat. When I got back, the vet had some very bad news for me: namely, that Juno had lost a lot of weight and that it was very likely due to her teeth rotting in her head. One canine was so loose they were able to just yank it out then and there with no issue, and her other canine is super loose as well. When the vet examined Octavia, he found a really similar problem. So both cats need dental surgery ASAP, and I booked them in for May 28th, which is TWO DAYS before we're meant to move. But honestly, they are in pain and not eating, and I don't want to wait any longer than I have to, especially since I don't know what the vet care situation is in Maxville. There is a veterinary clinic there (I used to take my pets there when I first moved to Ottawa) but I don't know if they're taking new patients, and immediate dental surgery might be a stretch even for them.

So for now we're switching them to wet food until after the surgery, and then we'll see if they can have kibble after that still or if they'll need to be on soft food for the rest of their lives.

I came home just in time to have a Zoom call with my parents, which I totally forgot about until they called me to ask where I was. OOPS. My parents, as usual, immediately told me I should euthanize the cats rather than spend money on surgery for them. My parents are delightful that way. Then my mother asked me how much this "joke" was going to cost me, and when I asked her what "joke" she meant, she listed the number of pets I have (two cats, two dogs). I understand that they are worried about my finances, but fucking hell, it would be nice if they eased up a little. It's not like I'm not going to deny veterinary care to my pets, and I will only give up my pets as a very last resort. 

Anyway, apart from that little unpleasantness, we had a nice, if brief chat. Now it's time for me to go get some dinner, and hopefully have a nap and a shower before work.

*falls over*

Unsurprisingly, my mother has come down with the same symptoms as my father. She's taking her meds and being a good patient and resting a lot and drinking a lot of fluids, and so far seems to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I spoke to both my parents yesterday evening, and they're both being pretty good about things. My father is always more motivated when my mother's well-being is very obviously on the line. I wish he were able to project that into being more careful the rest of the time, but that's probably too much to hope for. Neither one of them is particularly good at risk assessment or management, alas.

I've been harbouring a headache and a slightly sore throat since yesterday, and I cannot for the life of me tell if it's Covid or if it's just the stress of the week catching up to me combined with the truly terrible air quality at work or the cumulative effect of using the CPAP without the humidifier (because it was way too warm). Am I paranoid? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face. KK is going to be picking up fresh Covid tests tomorrow if we can find some, since ours are expired and therefore unreliable. It's been increasingly difficult to find Covid tests in Ottawa in the past couple of years--no one seems to carry them anymore. Shopper's Drug Mart apparently sells individual tests for $7.00 each, which is an absolute rip-off, but I expect nothing less from the Galen Weston Jr. empire. The main reason I don't know if it's Covid is because these symptoms do not at all match my parents' symptoms,  which are mainly extreme fatigue and some gastrointestinal stuff. So headache and slightly sore throat? Who knows?

Work is going by very slowly, partly because of the aforementioned headache. I'm glad it's not busier, though, because I've already made a pretty regrettable mistake this evening which my shift partner caught, luckily enough, and it's been a pain in the ass to fix. I hate making mistakes at work, even though objectively I know that they are unavoidable. It triggers my impostor syndrome like nobody's business. Oops, make that two mistakes. My coworker is saving my bacon tonight. The second mistake was when I was trying to fix the first mistake, and I didn't realize that there was a new SOP for fixing the mistake and I followed an old SOP for fixing the mistake. *lies on the floor*

I am really looking forward to my bed, which I will be in in about four hours if everything goes really well. I got relatively little sleep today, because we got home from KK's endoscopy shortly before noon, and then I had to wake up in order to be on time for my phone call with Brian, my birth father. He actually sent me a text message saying he'd caught a cold and could we postpone to tomorrow? To which I thought "Sweet, I can go back to sleep!" so I agreed, but I then had to field a call from work asking me to come in early and then changing their minds because the supervisor in question hadn't done the math properly and my coming in early wouldn't actually help anything. After that I had to field a call from my mortgage specialist because the auditor apparently decided that the mountain of paperwork I provided was not, in fact, enough to meet all of my financing conditions for the house. *headdesk* So I have had to send even more paperwork to prove I am not an evil money launderer trying to get a mortgage to launder the rest of my ill-gotten gains through a rural property in Southwestern Ontario.

So, yes. Very much looking forward to my bed now.

Okay. I am going to go heat the last of my lunch and wait for the shift to be over. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

 I am leaving this entry back-dated to yesterday. Shh, it still counts.

Anyway, I am going to try to recap some of this week, but I don't know if I can do it justice. It has been A Week.

So where I left off on Monday, I was about to drive to Montreal to see to my mother who had just admitted to falling and hitting her head on a chair. At the time she was more upset that there was blood all over her carpet than about the fact that she might have a concussion or other permanent damage. *sigh* I told her to call my aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) who is a retired nurse, and just talk things over with her to make sure there was no immediate danger.

I left KK in charge of all the animals, called work and told them I had a family emergency (RIP to my overtime for Easter Monday, alas, which I really kind of wanted to help defray the cost of the upcoming move), packed my bags and my CPAP and headed to Montreal. I arrived around half past midnight, and of course my mother was waiting up for me. She had a sizeable goose egg on the back of her skull, and there was a blood stain the size of a dinner plate on the bedroom carpet that she was very concerned about. I checked her for obvious signs of concussion and found none (her pupils were equal and reactive to light, she said her head didn't hurt, she knew the date/name of the Prime Minister/etc., and she wasn't nauseated or unbalanced or anything else), so I agreed to have us both sleep and go to the ER in the morning to get her checked out and to check in on my father, who was being kept overnight for additional testing.

During this time I fielded multiple messages from my aunt, and later on a call from my godfather, who had been kind enough to drive my parents to the ER the previous day.

The next morning we had breakfast and, as promised, I drove her to the ER. She proceeded to be a pain in the ass of the triage nurse, because she kept refusing to answer questions and insisting on seeing my father first. I finally put my foot down, and the triage nurse very kindly agreed to let us wait in the same room that my father was in once triage was completed. My father wasn't so much in a room as he was behind a curtain and another flimsy partition to separate him from other patients waiting longer-term in the ER. He was in relatively decent spirits and was obviously very happy to see my mother and then very concerned to hear that she'd taken a spill and hurt herself. There were lots of jokes about how that level of solidarity really wasn't necessary.

The rest of the morning was a real farce. My mother eventually got taken to another exam room, and I had about forty-seven different doctors all wanting my attention in separate places for each parent. The direct path between their rooms was forbidden to me because it was in an area restricted to medical staff, so I had to run the long way around each time and explain myself to a different security guard each time about why I was going back and forth so often. My mother was quickly cleared with a clean bill of health after a physical exam and an ECG to make sure her fall hadn't been the result of a cardiac event, and all the hospital staff kept refusing to believe that she is actually 88 years old. They'd never heard of an 88 year old woman who's never had an ECG in her life. (Money and health privilege is a real thing, folks!)

My father was seen by a lovely French doctor with the demeanour and bedside manner of a hurricane. She was just delightful, but she was a geriatric specialist who was clearly accustomed to dealing with elderly patients who aren't compos mentis, and she directed a barrage of questions at me about my father's cognition levels, his ability to function independently, whether he was able to bathe on his own, etc. I kept gently trying to steer her to ask him the questions, while my father sat there absolutely seething with indignation. I must admit I found it pretty hilarious at the time.

Eventually I was able to take my mother home, but my father was still awaiting several tests and had to stay behind again. I promised him I'd do some grocery shopping, and my mother insisted on coming with me. I convinced her that we should at least have a late lunch, since neither she nor I had eaten since breakfast, and she reluctantly agreed. When we finished tidying up after lunch, my father called me on my cell phone and blithely informed me that A) he'd left the hospital on his own and was at the local pharmacy, and B) the hospital had informed him as he was leaving that he had tested positive for Covid.

*rips out hair*

He refused to let me come pick him up, of course, and insisted on walking home, because he is a stubborn old goat. My mother in the meantime was freaking out, because a Covid diagnosis could be fatal to her due to her COPD/emphysema. She went into full denial immediately, insisting that the hospital had to be wrong, and then once I talked her down from that she got angry at me, mostly because I was the one there to be mad at. Anyway, we went through all five stages of grief in record time, I must say, and she still insisted on coming grocery shopping with me.

Grocery shopping with my mother is an exercise in patience. We had to go through the produce aisle four times and then ask an employee because they didn't have the specific oranges she wanted. "But they ALWAYS have them!" "Clearly they are not here today." "But they ALWAYS do!" And when we asked the employee, they confirmed that they did not, in fact, have those specific oranges, but would we be interested in one of the other five varieties they did have? (We would not, as it turned out.) We got a good chunk of the shopping done, but she also wanted to go to Atwater Market, which turned out to be closed at that hour. If I'd been by myself it probably would have been fine, but my mother is not the speediest person on the planet these days.

Anyway, we got home and found my father returned and in a bit of a bad mood, understandably so. He had brought his prescriptions from the pharmacy, and later on we got my mother's "emergency Covid" prescriptions delivered as well. She is only to take them if she develops symptoms, and they're basically pneumonia buster meds (prednisone and doxycyline). We also gave my mother a home Covid test, which came out negative, at least.

I explained the best practices of quarantining to my parents, and recommended that at minimum if they were in the same room together they should be wearing masks. I also recommended getting a HEPA filter to my mother, and she seemed amenable to the idea. I don't think they will be able to keep up with masking or distancing, because they like being together too much, and they're both terrible at masking for various reasons. *sigh* I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

I also updated my aunt on the latest developments, and called my godfather to let him know about the Covid diagnosis because he was in his presence unmasked for several hours on Monday, so both he and my godmother are at risk of getting Covid (which they both just got a couple of months ago and are barely recovered from).

On Wednesday morning I went out to get more groceries for my parents, enough to keep them stocked up for at least a week so they don't have to worry about going out while my father is still contagious. It might be longer, but they're not set up to keep more food than that, so we did the best we could with what we had. 

Since then I've been checking in when I can, and so far they seem to be doing okay. I have aged about ten years this week, but that was to be expected.

Okay, that is it for the parental unit update. Onward to the rest of this night shift!

I am *wiped*, so you are getting the tl;dr version tonight and I will post a more detailed entry tomorrow.

1- My mother is fine, apart from a fine goose egg on her neck and an impressive blood stain on her bedroom carpet.

2- My father is less fine, but is home from the hospital. He has fucking Covid, because he seems to labour under the misapprehension that wearing your mask firmly under your chin is an effective strategy for avoiding infection. *headdesk* He has a bunch of stuff going on all at once (digestive, some sort of kidney/UTI thing, plus the 'rona) and has been given antibiotics to help fend off the infection, but nothing else of immediate major concern.

3- My mother, who has COPD/emphysema, is freaking out about potentially getting Covid, because she doesn't mask reliably either (the masks make her feel like she can't breathe, because of the aforementioned COPD, which as I understand it is quite common).

4- My father is NOT freaking out enough, and insists he wants to go grocery shopping with me tomorrow with his active case of Covid. *headdesk* He has been exasperated with my refusal to let him go spread infection around the city. *rolls eyes*

Luckily for me I have been masking the whole time around him with my N95 (well, not so much "lucky" as "fucking cautious") and I was vaccinated a few months ago, so the odds of my getting infected are much lower. Not zero, but lower. I've given them pointers on quarantining once I go back home (probably tomorrow), but I have little faith they will stick to the guidelines, so I've also been priming my mother on what to do if she starts feeling symptomatic. She already has a medical action plan from her pulmonologist, so this is just to reinforce that with her. She also did a rapid test at home today, which was negative, so that's something.

I am going to load them up with groceries and easy meals tomorrow morning, and then I have to go back to Ottawa to my very neglected night shifts.

Okay, detailed account tomorrow, I promise. Right now I am going to go pass the fuck out.

Pixie was much improved this morning. She was excited to get out of her kennel and was even more excited to have some plain rice to eat as a snack. Said rice and water stayed where they were supposed to, and while she's not back up to 100% demon spawn levels of energy, she was pretty bouncy all day and counter-surfed, tried to climb the cat tree, and resumed her vigil by the basement gate in case I decided to let her downstairs to eat the quail. So I think she's pretty much on the mend, although I intend to stick to plain rice for at least another day to be on the safe side. 

I was the Greeter for Quaker Meeting today, and it went well. We've had some ruffled feathers in the Meeting of late, because everyone is very much on edge from, well, everything. *gestures broadly* The constitutional crisis in the US, innocent people getting deported to what is essentially a concentration camp in El Salvador (technically it's a prison, but the pictures from there are horrific, with men packed in like sardines, sometimes 80 to a cell, having to sleep standing up, etc.). This is not to say that I believe guilty people should be sent there either. No one, regardless of their status, should be sent to a place like that. Not even the worst, most horrific offenders, because that place is a horror show and even the worst criminals who have committed the most heinous crimes must be treated with a minimum of dignity, because they are human beings.

There's also the Canadian federal election coming up on April 28th. KK and I went to the advance polls today and cast our ballots. There were very few people there today, but CTV news reported that 2 million Canadians went to vote in advance on Friday, which is apparently a record! This is very encouraging indeed. I went over to the Elections Canada website, and of our population of 38,131,104 people, we have 27,642,171 people eligible to vote (i.e. citizens who are 18 years old or older and not the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada). From what I can see we've had a voter turnout that hovers in the 60% range, give or take, for the past 30 years, so I'd love to see more voter engagement this time around. I think I've missed one election in my adult life, although I don't remember which one it was. I have forbears who died for my right to vote, so I'm not about to squander it.

I just had a quick Skype call with my parents, and my mother immediately ratted out my father who apparently passed out today. He tried to blow it off, but I was not having it. I have extricated a promise from him to go see a doctor about it tomorrow. My father had a stroke nearly three years ago, and even though he was very lucky and came out of it with no ill effects, that still puts him at risk for another one. He said he wasn't feeling sick or dizzy, he just lost consciousness for a few seconds. *beats head against the nearest wall* Both my parents are terrible patients, and they tend to be noncompliant with a lot of the treatments they are prescribed as well. To say I am worried about this would be a fucking understatement. I reminded my mother that she had agreed with me that it would be a good idea to get a Life Alert button (or an equivalent, but honestly my research showed that Life Alert is one of the more comprehensive service providers out there), and she once again agreed with me. I don't think I can count on her to get one because I don't think she has the wherewithal to go through the whole process, and my father is pretty resistant to the idea at all. I don't know if I can convince both of them to go through with it, but I am damned well going to try.

Having aging parents is a LOT, y'all.

Okay. I am going to go do a last check on the quail, and then go to bed. I changed out their bedding today (it was *gross*), and they are super happy. They dug and scratched and floofed their feathers and made little nests in the pine shavings and made happy quail noises. It was absolutely adorable. They also laid two more eggs, which is awesome. I think tomorrow I will finally be making a recipe using the quail eggs, now that I have a full dozen (meaning the equivalent of about four chicken eggs).

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

You're getting another really short update, because it's nearly midnight and I desperately need sleep. It's been a long day.

For ONCE the house inspection went really well. There are some minor issues with the house that will have to be addressed over time, but nothing that can't be handled and nothing that looks like it will cost an arm and a leg. The garage is actually an old barn that's in rough shape, and it's still structurally more or less okay but will likely have to be torn down in a few years.

I drove to Montreal after the home inspection with KK (who came for moral support, bless her) and got my father to sign the paperwork I needed, and we figured out how to get a PDF of the account statement. I really hope the mortgage company fucking well accepts it now, even if it's slightly different than what they asked for, because what they asked for doesn't exist.

My parents were actually out when we arrived in Montreal, so since we had a couple of hours to kill we went to see the new Minecraft movie on a whim. It was cute, fun at times, but not particularly good, and not even Jack Black and Jason Momoa chewing up the scenery could save it. I recognized the younger actress from The Good Girl's Guide to Murder, which was fun. I really enjoyed that show.

I have now signed a modification to the house offer so that the owners will fix a small but important issue with the furnace, sent the payment to the home inspector, and sent the latest round of paperwork to my mortgage person. I also checked on the quail to change out their water (they are filthy things who like to sit in their water dishes) and added food tonight since they'd gone through it all since I gave it to them last night. Tomorrow morning I'll be going to a local feed store to get more quail-appropriate food, since chicken layer feed doesn't have quite enough protein in it for quail.

One day I will have a bit more time to come back and update in detail, but today is not that day.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Okay, so the Almost Perfect House is one step closer to becoming a reality! We put in an offer tonight, got a counter-offer with minor changes (moving the acceptance date to April 8th rather than 10th, the hot water heater turned out to be owned and not rented, small things like that), and so now all that's left is the house inspection and approval of the financing. I have unofficial approval for the financing already, but it does need to be green-lit by the people who are in control of the money. *sigh*

I really, REALLY hope that there's nothing horribly wrong with the new house. It does have some logistical issues, namely that the smaller of the two bedrooms is really, really small. We'll have to tear out the loft beds, because I am too fat and definitely too old to contort myself into a loft bed that was clearly designed for children every single day, and since the room is only 9' x 9' I'm thinking I will invest in a Murphy bed, perhaps with a built-in desk for when I need to work from home and don't want to set up on the kitchen table. 

Otherwise, the rest of the house has lots of storage and decent amounts of space for everything else. There's no guest room, but if I keep my own room super tidy I can always put my parents up there and sleep on the sofa or a cot in the living room while they're visiting. 

My parents are deeply unthrilled with the house, but luckily they don't have to live there. They think it's too far from Ottawa, too flimsily built (it's not), and they are miffed that KK gets the really nice big bedroom with access to the outside patio and an en-suite bathroom (they think I should get it because I'm the one buying the house), but honestly from an accessibility perspective it makes no sense to put her in the small room. I also get access to all of the nice outbuildings and the greenhouse and four entire acres of land that KK has no interest in. Also, did I mention it has a swimming pool? It's not the feature that attracted me, but I am not mad about it. It will be really nice to relax in the pool in the hot summer, and the dogs will love it, I am quite sure. We may have trouble keeping them *out* of the pool, frankly.

Okay. I should try really hard not to get ahead of myself. Things can still go wrong. But if they don't, I will practically be neighbours with my friends J and t!, whom long-time readers will remember as ai731 and the_exclamation, neither of whom are active on LJ anymore. They used to be my neighbours and landlords back when I lived in Ville Émard, and it will be nice to spend more time with J again. We used to hang out much more regularly when I was working at the RCMP and living in Vanier. Maybe we can start up our cooking days again! That would be a lot of fun.

Anyway, AGAIN, I am trying not to get ahead of myself (and kind of failing). This is the problem with having a constant deficit of chill, I get exciting about things before they are a sure thing.

Time for bed. Keep your fingers crossed, folks!

Why is driving so tiring? I spent five total hours on the road today, only a little less time than I actually spent with my parents, and I am knackered. We had a really lovely day, though, so I have no regrets.

We toasted my mother's 88th birthday with a half-bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and then had a delicious dinner of beef brochettes, bok choy, and ratatouille, culminating in a small array of absolutely delicious French cheeses. Montreal has such good cheese, and I haven't yet found a good fromagerie here in Ottawa. I also haven't looked very hard, I must say, because KK doesn't like stinky French cheeses, and it seems like a waste to buy it just for myself. 

I came home about an hour ago, and sent out the announcements for Quaker Meeting tomorrow, and soon I shall be heading upstairs to lapse into a metaphorical coma in my very comfy bed. I've had a low-grade headache lingering all day, and I am hoping that sleep and maybe a bit more Tylenol will take care of it. I had some Tylenol earlier tonight and that has taken the edge off but hasn't completely vanquished it.

Tomorrow is Meeting for Worship for Business for the Quakers, and I have volunteered to be the bearer of News That Some People Will Not Like, namely that Ministry & Counsel has decided we're going back to three hybrid Meetings a month rather than only two. The person who is clerking tomorrow is one of the few but highly vocal people who haaaaaaates the hybrid meetings, so I expect there will be some sort of psychodrama about it. How much drama will depend probably entirely on how maturely that person handles themselves, and I am not holding out a ton of hope. I am honestly a little disappointed in this person, even though I am also unsurprised given what I know about their beliefs and personality. I hope that if they are sensible and get that the sense of the Meeting is to bring people back together, they will stand aside on this issue (and also not be a prig about it).

I've also been asked to serve on Nominating Committee, which is the committee responsible for getting other people onto committees. The Committee Committee, if you will. The main reason is that all the very experienced Friends who were on it have come to the end of their term this year, and the only people who volunteered are two brand new Attenders who aren't super familiar with the Meeting and have next to no ideas about Quaker processes. So it turns out that my eleven years of being in the Meeting and also being part of Ministry and Counsel qualify me to shepherd the newbies and be part of their education. It's a little nerve-wracking, but also the people who asked me aren't entirely wrong about my understanding a good chunk of Quaker processes, at least at the level of Monthly Meeting. I am absolutely ignorant about Yearly Meeting and all of the larger parts of the Quaker organizations in Canada, but luckily we won't be dealing with them at all.

Tonight is Daylight Savings Time. *weeps quietly* Maybe now that we're in a trade war with the USA we can stop aligning ourselves with them on their time changes, or just outright get rid of DST. I hate it SO MUCH. I'd much rather have the daylight in the morning than in the evening any day of the year. We're not even "saving" daylight, the number of hours of daylight in the day don't magically increase because of it, we're just playing a weird game of Find the Queen except with artificial time markers. Bah. Another reason to go to bed as soon as possible tonight, because I am going to be feeling that lost hour of sleep for DAYS.

One thing you don't grasp as a child is that becoming an adult essentially means giving up a huge chunk of your free time. Until I moved out on my own, I essentially had two adults who did a lot of stuff for me without my really noticing. Don't get me wrong, I was expected to help around the house and contribute to the overall functioning of our household, but that's very much not the same as having to do it all myself on top of holding down a full-time job.

This is my roundabout way of complaining that basically every single day next week is taken up by commitments, even though I have the whole week "off" work. I am deeply annoyed by the fact that I won't have any downtime at all until I have to go back to work the following Monday. It's very rude, is what it is, and honestly I am tired just thinking about it.

The good news is that, much to my surprise, KK agreed to move her in-office shift from Monday to Tuesday, so tomorrow I shall zip to Montreal with the Hubris Shawl and a couple of other things I got for my mother, specifically some new KN95 masks for her to try out and a pulse oximeter. I have been worried for quite some time that my mother will resist seeking medical attention when she needs it because she tends to dismiss any symptoms as minor or unimportant, and I'm hoping having an objective measure will help her make that determination. The one I got has good reviews and wasn't super expensive, and I can show her at what number she should definitely seek medical care. Her compromised lung function already puts her at considerable risk, so also knowing when *not* to go to the hospital is also a useful skill to acquire.

The plan is to leave around 8am, which will put me in Montreal by about 11am, especially given the current meteorological conditions, and then leave maybe around 7pm to avoid rush hour traffic and the aforementioned meteorological conditions, which are pretty terrible right now. It didn't snow much overnight, much to my relief, but it has been snowing steadily all day while I've been at the office, so I fully expect the roads to be an absolute nightmare for the next couple of days until the city can get them cleared properly. Driving in was pretty gnarly despite the relative paucity of snow, because the ploughs weren't out yet. Logistically it makes sense. The plough drivers will likely be doing 16 hour stints and desperately need sleep, so it makes more sense to send them out once a lot more snow has fallen so as to maximize the effect of the ploughing, rather than having them scrape two centimeters at a time off the roads and then have to go off shift just as the storm hits its peak. 

Speaking of ploughs, I'm not at all convinced my property management folks will have gotten around to my driveway by the time I get home tonight, so I am bracing for having to pull out my shovel and clear myself a space in there. My immediate neighbours, who share the driveway with me, drove away on Thursday and I haven't seen their car nor any sign it has come back to the driveway since that day. I'm not sure if they just decided to park it elsewhere until the snow was completely removed, or if they just went on a little trip together that happened to coincide with the winter storm.

In the meantime, I have reached out to a local professional organizer. I am 100% fed up with the state of the house, and I can't do it on my own. KK is not going to be of any help for a variety of reasons, so I'm hoping the lady I emailed with today will not be faint of heart and will help me manage within the parameters of the current state of the house. I'm willing to purge more of my stuff to make room, but KK is not going to want to part with any of hers, so I have to figure out storage solutions for all of that in a way that will allow me to keep functioning

My main hope is to start with the garage and turn that into a more functional storage space than it currently is, then turn my attention to the main floor and the basement. I am reasonably confident I can tackle my bedroom on my own, but if that turns out to also require a helping hand, I can always avail myself of the services again. Of course, we might not start with the garage simply because it's been so damned cold lately, and my garage is unheated, so that might have to wait for more clement weather. I'd much rather do the garage first so that it can serve as a staging/storage area, but needs must, I guess. We could always start in the basement or the kitchen. The kitchen is the most in need of some kind of organizing, but we have «l'embarras du choix» as they say. 

I'm just over halfway through my last weekend shift at work. Another five hours and I can GTFO. Pray for good road conditions, friends!

Okay, maybe not, but I have been pretty productive today.

I have processed almost all of the meat I bought--and by "processed" I mean I have separated it out into portions, vacuum-sealed it, labelled it along with today's date, and put it in the freezer for future use. The only things I have left to process are the six whole chickens I bought, and I am most likely to do that tomorrow, since that requires a little bit more planning and effort. I've only carved up whole raw chickens once before, but the internet is a wonderful thing, so I'm reasonably confident I can do it again. I do need to get myself a good boning knife, or possibly a fillet knife, I'm not sure which would be appropriate for carving up a chicken carcass into its component bits. Either way, I don't have one of those knives, so I will have to make do with my butcher's knife and my chef's knife in the meantime. I am sure they will be up to the task. My goal this time is to try to carve up "bone in" chicken breasts so that I can use them in some of my slow cooker recipes, because keeping the bone in keeps the chicken from drying out as much, and I find that breast meat is very prone to drying out. The internet so far has not been as helpful because all the videos and tutorials assume I want to remove the breast from the bone, which is absolutely not the case.

I've also chopped up some bok choy in advance for tonight's dinner, because I have a Skype call with my parents every Sunday at 5pm, and they typically keep me chatting until 6pm or later, so I don't want to spend too long on food prep afterward, because that will necessarily delay dinner. I just realized I forgot to mince a shallot before coming downstairs, because that's also kind of time consuming. Oops. Oh well. Having the bok choy ready is already a step in the right direction.

I forgot that I signed up for a gardening workshop tonight at 7pm, so things are going to be a little tight. I may ask my parents if they're okay with a slightly shorter call tonight, but I don't want to make it too short. We only really get to talk once a week reliably, and next Sunday I'll be working, so we won't get to talk until Monday. These days I am a little more acutely aware of the passage of time, and I'm reluctant to shorten any time I spend with my parents. When they are gone I will not be glad I shortened our calls so that I could get my shallots chopped in time, you know?

It's been a productive weekend overall. I can't say I'm mad about any of it, or even disappointed that I didn't quite get everything done that I would have liked to. I had some pretty ambitious plans (by my standards only), and so even getting a little over half of them accomplished feels pretty good.

So, a short post today. Perhaps I will have more--and more interesting--stuff to share tomorrow. I am starting a full seven days of night shifts, so I may have more time for thinky-thought type posts.