March 5th, 2026
Mar. 5th, 2026 03:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeAnyway, this is a very long update, so I will put it behind a cut.
1- State of the Phnee
Work
There’s good news and bad news. Good news? My contract has been renewed. Bad news? It’s only been renewed until June 24th. So, it will be nice to not be unemployed for a little while longer, but the sword of Damocles is still hanging over my head, and there’s no way to tell if they’ll decide to renew again. My manager is fighting the good fight, but he isn’t feeling “warm and fuzzy” about it, to quote him directly.
So, I’m going to have to buckle down and start applying to more jobs. My application with CSE is still pending, and I’ve been informed that they are experiencing delays in the hiring process. *weeps quietly* That’s a long-term prospect anyway, as I’d require a TOP SECRET clearance, and that sort of process usually takes a minimum of 18 months to complete under the best of circumstances.
I think that I will look for something as close to home as possible, even if that means taking a salary hit. If I don’t have to drive two-plus hours a day to get to Ottawa plus pay for parking, that will save me a fair bit of money, especially with gas prices likely to increase dramatically what with the latest horrors being unleashed in the Middle East. My options may be a bit more limited, but I have some transferable skills. I’ve crunched some of the numbers, and while I can’t afford a huge salary hit, I do have a bit of wriggle room. I’ll have to look around and see what’s out there. If I get lucky, I might be able to get a job at a place that will get me some unexpected perks, like free building materials for the property or something. I will take whatever I can get.
Fitness & what have you
I’ve been a little hit-and-miss on the exercise front, but I’m still mostly plugging away at things. The treadmill at work is a real lifesaver for that. Even if I slack off at home a little bit, I can always pull it out and do some walking at my desk without too much trouble. I need to get a little more disciplined about working out at home, especially getting back into weight and resistance training. Still, I’m not mad about the work I am putting in. Progress, not perfection, and I have been getting reasonably regular exercise, so it’s not all bad.
My brain has been letting me down a lot lately. My short-term memory is completely shot, and it kind of feels worse than it’s ever been. I don’t know if it’s just the effect of stress (looming unemployment, eee!) or if there’s something else going on, but I hate it, thank you. It has made me drop some balls, especially when it comes to my Ministry & Counsel responsibilities, although luckily none of the balls have been super important so far. But yeah, every time I think “Oh, I need to do X,” the thought immediately vanishes from my brain within about 5-10 minutes.
I have an appointment with my GP that I need to reschedule because I accidentally double-booked myself, but when I next see her I’ll be asking about revising my meds. My prescription ran out in, like, September, but because my doctor up and left her practice along with a few other doctors, I couldn’t get an appointment for several months, and then the lack of meds really kicked in and I spent weeks forgetting to make an appointment. Then when I remembered I had to have a fight to the death with the office’s automated phone system, which kept hanging up on me whenever I selected the option to make an appointment. I’m deeply annoyed about this move, because it was imposed on me unilaterally, and not only is the new office even further away (necessitating a three-plus-hour round trip for a 15 minute appointment, which is fucking insulting), but now they are offering a “concierge” service, which boils down to my having to pay money out of pocket every year to cover things like the filling out of forms and prescription refills (any refill done in person is free, at least, but then I have to pay for gas, so not exactly free). So much for socialized healthcare. I kind of wish I’d been given the option to stay with the previous clinic, because I didn’t even choose this doctor, she was imposed on me when my old doctor decided she didn’t want to practice medicine anymore. Bah.
Parental Units
It was my mother’s birthday yesterday. She’s 89 years old! It’s simultaneously really easy and really hard to believe. I can see the signs that she’s getting older, slowing down a bit, all that, but she also seems immortal and indestructible. The cognitive dissonance is something else.
I’m supposed to visit the parental units the week after next, and I need to figure out what to get her as a present. I’m thinking of getting her what she would characterize as “unromantic” gifts—some practical things to make her life a little easier. For one thing, she doesn’t own a proper shoehorn, so I want to get her a couple of long-handled ones to help with shoes and boots. She also made wistful noises about those grabber things with a long handle after she was loaned one after her hip surgery, so I may get her one of those too. I am a little stumped on what other small accessibility tools I can get her. I wanted to get her one of those kettle tippers that holds your kettle for you while you pour, but my mother has a stovetop fancy kettle she bought in France years ago that has a very weird shape (it’s small and very squat and sort of flat, for lack of a better word), and all the ones I could find are built to fit standard electric kettles, which she doesn’t want to use, because she understandably loves her weird little kettle. More research is in order. I’m also open to suggestions!
Quaker Stuff
It has been a busy time for Quaker things! I am starting to regret volunteering to be the Clerk of Ministry and Counsel, I can’t lie. For one thing, I keep forgetting to do things in a timely fashion or just not thinking of things at all, like not arranging refreshments during the Claremont Dialogue we held just over a week ago. Then again, given how few people showed up, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t, because I would have overspent for sure. Still, I was annoyed at myself for not even thinking of it at the time. I would say it’s a valuable lesson learned, but I am not convinced I will remember this the next time it would be relevant, because as I said before, my brain is mush.
The main reason I’m having regrets is that there is SO. MUCH. DRAMA. that I just wasn’t aware of before this. Like, behind the scenes, the Quakers are very dramatic bitches. So now I’m navigating two or three interpersonal conflicts, none of which I especially want to deal with. Blech.
The State of Society Report is due this coming Sunday, and I have received exactly ZERO feedback from the larger Meeting, which makes me very suspicious. The last two years the Meeting tore the report to shreds and insisted it be re-written, so the fact that no one is even so much as quibbling about the wording has me very on edge. Like, sure, I am a good writer, but no comments at all? Not one? That’s weird. They have until the end of this week to send me comments, I guess, but since it’s been three weeks I doubt I’m going to get much of substance in that time.
Finances
It’s tax season, and I need to find a new accountant. I should have done this earlier, but see above: brain is mush. H&R Block royally fucked me over last year, and I had to pay $8,000 in taxes (and I still owe H&R Block money for the advance they mistakenly gave me because they calculated a refund, but I’m not in a huge hurry to pay them back, I can’t lie). I also noticed that they fucked up my First Homebuyer’s Plan reimbursement too, by assuring me my balance was $0 when it, in fact, was not, so now I will owe taxes on the amount I took out of my RRSPs last year as well. Fun times! I’d be less stressed about it if I wasn’t staring down the barrel of unemployment in my very near future. The plan (I hope) is to find a good local accountant who can help me accurately figure out how much I owe, and then I will call CRA and try to convince them to put me on a payment plan. The “good” news is that I am pretty sure that the worst thing that will happen is that I will owe a fuckton of money on my taxes, and not that the CRA will somehow rescind my house purchase, which is what the gremlin intrusive thoughts keep trying to tell me will happen. It just doesn’t make any sense when they can simply charge me all the money I “owe” them, with interest.
*lies on the floor*
Don’t do large financial transactions unless you’re independently wealthy, kids, it’s not worth the stress. I love the new property, but in retrospect I wish I’d stayed as a renter, given how shitty the financial side of this has been.
2- State of the smallholding
House Stuff
Speaking of money, I am spending money I don’t really have in the name of having a more functional kitchen. My pantry is really, really deep, to the point where I can’t actually reach the back unless I wedge myself up to the shoulder in there. It’s been super inconvenient, so KK got in touch with AJ, our local carpenter/handyman, and I am hiring him to install sliding shelves. That way I can just pull them out to get what I need, rather than having to pull everything out of the pantry just to get an item from the back, and then have to put everything away again, which is a pain in the ass and usually results in my pantry getting super messy and disorganized. The hassle has also been discouraging me from cooking along with the fact that there are no clear surfaces to work on, because the lack of a functional pantry has also meant that other stuff can’t be or doesn’t get put away properly. AJ gave me a quote which is much cheaper than I was anticipating, which is excellent news. We agreed that he will come by next week sometimes to get the work done, so I am really looking forward to having a more functional pantry.
KK has been doing better since her health disaster in December, to the point where she was actually able to help me do some stuff this weekend! We brought up the microwave stand from the basement, and I moved all of the tea paraphernalia from one of the kitchen cabinets into it, freeing up a considerable amount of space for pantry items, specifically everything that’s in bottles. Then I moved the pasta that KK had piled in the corner cabinet with the turn tables back in the day to the pantry, and I will be moving mixing bowls and the smaller pots and pans onto the turn tables, freeing up lower cabinet space for the larger pots and pans and bakeware, as well as maybe an extra small appliance or two. I’m about 80% done with that project, which is encouraging. My hope is to get the kitchen island almost completely clear of stuff except for my compost bin, cutting board, and eventually my two little hydroponic gardens so I can grow herbs indoors all year round.
Farming Stuff
In livestock news, the remaining quail are still going strong. When the weather is warmer (we’ve had some wibbly wobbly temperature stuff this year) they lay a bit more, and I’ve decided to take a risk and try incubating the eggs I collected in January. The rate of viable eggs has been moderate at best: I started with 19 eggs and am now down to 12 (7 of them either never got fertilized or else froze and therefore never had a chance), and some of those had shells that were so thick that I wasn’t sure that they were viable when I was candling them. That being said, I had eight chicks hatch overnight! They are super cute when they’re newly hatched—just tiny floofballs. There are still 4 eggs that haven’t hatched, and I won’t know until later if there’s anything going on there. I think this time I will wait at least 36 hours before I try removing any chicks from the incubator, maybe even a bit longer, because I worry that last time I accidentally shrink-wrapped some of the chicks in their eggs (that’s when the membrane in the egg contracts due to lack of moisture after opening the incubator). Still, 8 chicks is far better than I was hoping for, so I am quite happy with it.
I have more eggs ready to go in the incubator as soon as the current batch have hatched (if any), and I actually got the local library to 3D print some quail egg inserts for my incubator, which was designed for much larger chicken and duck eggs (and maybe goose and turkey, but I couldn’t swear to it). Right now, I can incubate about 20 eggs comfortably, and with the inserts I will be able to incubate up to 56 eggs in the same space, which is very exciting. With the warming weather, the quail have been laying between 3 and 6 eggs pretty consistently every day, so I should have plenty of eggs to choose from.
I’ve decided to pull the trigger this year and start raising meat rabbits. I’m going to go to the same auction where I got the quail last year and be on the lookout for rabbits. There were a few last year, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to get some this year. I will need to be careful to make sure that I get at least one buck and two does, as otherwise I won’t have the minimum required for a successful breeding program. Ideally, I’d like a spare buck for a bit of genetic variety, but the auction is a bit of a crapshoot in terms of what you can find at any given time. Just because there are rabbits doesn't mean that they will be the rabbits I’m looking for. I’m thinking of either Standard Rex or New Zealand, since they are pretty common and they apparently have the best meat-to-carcass ratio, but there’s no way to tell ahead of time if anyone will be selling rabbits of the breed I’m looking for.
As an added complication, I am not sure that I’ll have everything set up in time to acquire rabbits at the auction. I seem to recall that last year the auction took place later in April, which would have given me more time to get my act together. As it is, the auction is in exactly one month, on April 4th, and that’s not a lot of time. My plan is to move the quail out of their current enclosures, which are actually two rabbit hutches, and temporarily house the bunnies in those hutches until I can buy or build better rabbit cages (the hutches are all made of wood and are actually kind of a pain to keep clean). However, the quail and eventually other poultry will be moving to a new coop/run that I have purchased but not installed yet because my property is still under a couple of feet of snow. Very difficult to build any kind of permanent structure (even if it’s somewhat semi-permanent like a poultry run) when everything is either frozen, under two feet of snow, or else just an ocean of mud. I’m anticipating that I will have to do the building in the third week of March because that’s when I have time to get it done (it’s my last week off before going back on day shift), but if the weather doesn't cooperate I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I suppose I could always order pre-made stacker cages or hanging cages, but that is a lot of money for someone who’s about to be unemployed, and there’s still no guarantee they would arrive in time. Eesh. Self-made problems, I swear.
There’s other equipment and materials that I will need to get aside from cages, too. There’s feeders and waterers, and I will need to buy or build nesting boxes as well. I will have to buy rabbit feed and hay (that part is pretty easy), and of course equipment for the slaughtering/butchering process, although most of that is fairly cheap. The most expensive thing for that is getting a good dispatching tool (sometimes known as a “hopper popper” or “rabbit wringer,” which allows for cervical dislocation, and a gambrel to help with skinning (it’s basically shaped like a coat hanger and has two loops to hold the rabbit’s hind feet when you skin it). I am still a tiny bit worried about my ability to murder the cute bunnies, but I think I can do it, and it will be good to have a steady, reliable source of meat that doesn’t come from the grocery store.
Next week I have a date with Jan to do a bunch of seed starting, so that should be fun. She has very generously offered to babysit my seedlings, as I have very little by way of extra space in the house for them for now. In light of this, I need to dig out my seeds and also the grow lights I bought a couple of years ago but haven’t used yet, as well as some of the modular shelving units I had at the old house and which can be used to hold the aforementioned seedlings once they’re planted in trays. All of it is packed up in a million boxes scattered around the basement, so I’m going to have my work cut out for me to get it all pulled together in time.
I also have several raised beds in galvanized steel that I need to set up on the property, and I haven’t yet figured out where to put them. Logic dictates putting them as close to the house as possible, but unfortunately that’s where I plan to fence in the dogs, and I don’t want my adorable hooligans rampaging through my vegetables if I can help it. The other place I can put them is near an already existing in-ground bed, but that’s quite far from the house, so I will have to exercise quite a lot more willpower to make sure I get out there on a regular basis to do weeding and other gardening necessities. I also need to watch the water flow and accumulation on the property, so make sure the garden beds don’t get too saturated in the spring or too dry in the late summer. So many variables!
I am trying to be reasonable about the number of seedlings I start this year, because I am aware of the temptation to plant all the things, resulting in a garden that’s too big and overwhelming to manage for a relative beginner. It is *so tempting*, though, I can’t lie. I want all the veggies!
Oh, and of course I’d eventually like to start growing feed crops for the quail and for the as-yet hypothetical rabbits (mostly as a supplement to their feed, since their nutrition is actually pretty complicated to get right). I don’t know if that’s a realistic goal for this year, even though I don’t plan on exclusively feeding the livestock from the garden. I was thinking more along the lines of growing my own Timothy hay to supplement the rabbit pellets, and a bunch of greens as a treat for the quail. Which reminds me that I should check to see if the local feed store has rabbit pellets or if I’ll have to source them from Ottawa the way I do with the quail feed.
To add to my current ambitions, I’ve also considered raising mealworms, which my quail love as a tasty treat. I have to be careful about how many I feed them, because they are very high in protein, which I am told results in larger eggs, and my quail already lay eggs that are larger than average. If you’re wondering why I want to avoid that, it’s because it increases the risk of prolapse in the hens. I’ve already lost one hen to a prolapse—I’m almost certain the hen that died was the one who had a prolapse, even though she appeared to recover from it after I treated her. So, yeah, I am trying to be judicious about how many mealworms they eat for that reason. However, if I get chickens, which is definitely on the list this year, they also love mealworms, and I think the risk is far less with chickens.
3- State of the news
*continues to gesture wildly*
Uh, so, the US is now at war with Iran, only it’s an illegal war because there was no congressional approval, but also they are totally not at war it’s actually Israel that’s at war and the US is, uh supporting them. Yes, supporting. Only they are supporting by accidentally having allied shoot down three of their aircraft in a single day by accident (oops), and I’ve seen reports that they might not actually have enough munitions to carry on a war for any length of time? Oh, and they keep killing the leaders with whom they say they want to negotiate. What a shit show.
Last week was the State of the Union address, which I ended up watching even though I don’t usually make a point of watching it or ever directly listening to Donald Trump. His voice makes me want to claw out my own eardrums. I am pretty sure the State of the Union Address is not meant to include that many shout-outs. He also said basically nothing of substance and also didn’t actually address the state of the union at all, even though he spoke for two hours in an attempt to break the previous record for the length of the speech. It was so weird.
Then there was the admittedly much less important shitshow with the US men’s Olympic hockey team laughing at Trump’s misogynistic jokes and getting invited to the State of the Union Address and losing all of America’s goodwill overnight in exchange for cold McDonald’s burgers and some plastic water bottles. I think we’re collectively having a moment where we are all sick of men’s shit, given all the givens.
It’s actually kind of difficult to keep up with all the latest horrors, because there seems to be a new one every two to three days. Sometimes it’s something new every day, during bad weeks.
IT’S SO MUCH.
This post is already incredibly long, so I will save the Canadian political news for another day, I think.
Catch you on the flip side, friends!
