Today was a very lazy Saturday. I hung out with Peggy and the cats and watched multiple episodes of Death in Paradise, which is very enjoyable and requires no intellectual effort or major emotional commitment on my part. It kind of has a revolving door of "eccentric" white male Detective Inspectors, and while part of me wishes they'd depart from the formula, another part of me understands that the whole schtick of the show is the "fish out of water" trope of the white English man in the tropics. Either way, it's a nice way to spend a Saturday with your pets.
Peggy is, as always, too clever for her own good and has learned how to unlock the back door and jimmy it open. She then gets to launch herself gaily into the neighbourhood to chase squirrels and explore and zoom around. A friend cut a 2 by 4 for me to use to block the track of the sliding glass door, but she's figured out how to dislodge it. Anyway, I have constructed a temporary barricade with a chair and a cat tree, and I am going to get a proper barring mechanism from Canadian Tire, or something.
I discovered this year that Peggy is something of a savant when it comes to locking mechanisms. First she figured out how to open her crate on her own. Then she worked out her seatbelt in the car, followed by the kennel she sometimes stays at when she's with her trainer. This year she started training for bird hunting, and she figured out the mechanism of the traps her trainer uses to hold live birds so that she could jump right on top of them and launch the birds directly into her mouth. Too clever by half, is what she is. It's hilarious but also super inconvenient.
In less fun news, my downstairs toilet leaked and started flooding the powder room last night. Luckily I caught it pretty quickly, so there wasn't any water damage, but now I have to call my property managers and ask them to send a plumber to fix it. Ugh. It's just inconvenient, nothing worse than that. I won't have to pay for it (probably), and all I have to do is open a work ticket. Actually, come to think of it, there's an internet portal for that these days, so I'll probably do that. I just don't want to deal with a plumber over the weekend if I don't have to.
I went to bed late yesterday because of Mage, so I am considering an early night tonight. I also kind of want to play Stardew Valley after I've put Peggy to bed. I have to put her in her crate when I'm playing a video game, because bless every bone in her body, she gets into things if I'm not watching her. That means that I try not to play games during daylight hours anymore, because I don't want to coop her up any more than I have to--she already spends a lot of time in her crate when I'm at work on the days she's not at daycare. She doesn't mind her crate at all, I should specify. In fact, she voluntarily puts herself to bed when she's tired. She gets special treats in the crate that she gets at no other time, and she seems to understand it's her safe space for sleeping and being cozy. Still, she's an active, high-energy dog, so I want her to be able to zoom around to her heart's content when I'm home. That means video games are now limited to maybe a couple of hours in the evening, and I only seem to get to them once a week or so these days. It's not the end of the world, but I do miss playing for longer stretches at a time.
I think I had originally planned to talk about work in this post, but ugh. I'll come back to it another time. Things are fine at work, I was mainly planning to chatter to myself about my plans. I'm going to do some work tomorrow on the standardisation of the PSE evaluations, because I want to make sure to have the first draft sent to the supervisors for their input before Monday. I have Quaker Meeting for Worship in the morning and Meeting for Business in the early afternoon, so that should take up the rest of my day. It will still be a quiet day, but much busier than today, that's for sure.
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