Corner of Bourbon & Division

What the subject line says: 0/10, do not recommend.

We are 36 hours away from moving time, and we are still nowhere near ready, although we have made a lot of progress, thanks in great part to our friends who helped us to pack yesterday and today. Two of the three came back today, and between the four of us we got the main floor almost completely packed.

I have realized a few things during this process

1- Very few people know how to pack properly for a move.
2- KK is fucking terrible at packing.
3- KK has a very different definition of "finished" than I do. 

KK had the bright idea to pack up some of the packing supplies over the weekend, specifically the box cutters and markers, so that there was only one box cutter and one marker for the entire house. I may have lost my shit at her just a little bit when I found this out yesterday. I have no idea what she was thinking, and honestly neither does she. I also had to give her instructions on how to label boxes when I found that she had labelled all of the boxes she'd packed "desk stuff." Now, I don't care what she labels her own stuff, but I wasn't about to put up with poorly labelled boxes that we all know I am going to have to unpack.

I am grateful that she stayed to help pack up the downstairs, but she is very far behind on packing up her bedroom, as am I. At one point today she looked around the living room and declared us finished, and my jaw just about hit the floor, because there was loose stuff everywhere--at least three boxes' worth. I have no idea why she thought we were finished when we very clearly weren't.

Also, bless her socks, she is CONSTANTLY interrupting me when I'm packing, or when I'm doing anything at all. I can't get through a single box without her asking me to fetch her something or do something or answer a question, and it's driving me CRAZY. I have a hard enough time keeping my thoughts together without constant interruptions, and my patience has worn so thin that it is basically nonexistent so it's taking every ounce of my willpower not to constantly snap at her. She has a real knack for interrupting me right as I'm getting into a state of flow, too. I know that a huge part of this is just that I am very tired and very stressed, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't mind this nearly as much. Right now, though, it feels like trying to pack up the entire house with a very demanding pre-teen: old enough to be helpful, not old enough to do anything truly independently. She's also going through ALL of the boxes we bought to pack up both our bedrooms. I thought she was going to do a bit of a triage of her clothes and not keep everything, but apparently I was wrong. She is keeping it all, and God only knows where she thinks it's all going to fit. So tomorrow I will have to buy more boxes for my bedroom, because there will be none left.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of stuff to pack up in the basement, the entire cat room (books, office supplies, etc.), and my bedroom and bathroom. Tomorrow morning we're grabbing a small truck from U-Haul to bring as much stuff over there as possible that would be too fiddly or time-consuming for the movers to move on their own.

The plan is then for KK to stay at the house and wait for the internet service provider to come, and I just had a horrifying realization that we may not have electricity at the new house if the previous owners shut off their account the minute they moved. I completely forgot to contact the local electrical company to set up an account for us, so I just did that online, but it's very unlikely they will hook us up tomorrow. Fuck. At least we have a gas generator so we can at least power the fridge and freezers while we're there, but it's going to suck if we don't have electricity for however long it takes for us to get connected.

I am exhausted. I've been responsible for 90% of this move by default: switching all the service providers, dealing with all the mortgage paperwork, buying most of the packing supplies, making arrangements for the packing, and my brain isn't good for juggling that much information even on a good day, let alone after the past six weeks of hospitalized parents, Covid, night shifts at work, and everything else.

*pauses journal entry to go make a service request online*

Okay. I will ask KK to call them tomorrow while she's waiting at the house for the internet provider and see if they can rush the connection request. They already service the address, so hopefully it just means flipping a switch long-distance and doesn't require a technician come out. 

I want to go to bed because I can barely see straight, but if I do that instead of packing up the basement I don't know if I'll be able to get everything done. Fuckity fucking fuck.

In other news, Octavia and Juno had their dental surgery today, and it went very well and was very expensive. They are both tired but doing well and have already had food and the first dose of their antibiotics for the next four days.

Okay. Time to go feed and water the quail, and then, I don't know, I may go to bed and force myself to get up way earlier than I want to in order to get some packing done before I go to U-Haul. I didn't manage to get up early enough today, but tomorrow the panic may set in and help with getting up early, I don't know. Mostly I can't see straight, and I don't know that I have it in me to pack another box tonight.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

WE MADE IT.

The sellers got us the necessary paperwork so that I am not legally responsible for their financial shenanigans. Wafik was not in the office today, but I was able to get hold of Peggy, the person who got my mortgage approved a couple of months ago, and after a nerve-wracking five hours I was finally able to go to the downtown branch of the credit union and get the bank draft I needed.

I then drove like a bat out of hell to Alexandria in an attempt to get the thing to my lawyer. She told me she needed it by 2:30pm or 3:00pm at the very latest, and unfortunately I was not able to bend the laws of space and time to get there on time, but I did get there at 3:15, which is honestly a fucking miracle.

Then my lawyer pulled a miracle out of her ass and managed to register everything at 4:59pm (you can't register anything past 5pm) and joked that I was the record-holder for that.

So I now own a house! Or, rather, I now am responsible for a mortgage that allows me to live in a house! YAY! There is a lockbox on the door, apparently, where I can get the house keys, so we will be checking that on Thursday when we start bringing stuff to the house ahead of the movers. I want to bring a lot of my gardening equipment (the loose stuff that's hard to pack), all of our plants, and a bunch of the loose stuff that's in the basement.

KK finally started packing over the weekend, and I am trying super hard not to micromanage her, but it is so hard to resist. For all that she is super organized about a ton of things in life, she is absolute dogshit at packing. She actually packed up most of the packing supplies! Like, WHY. We aren't even close to done, why would you pack up all but one Sharpie and one boxcutter? Bonkers. Her method of packing is also super haphazard, AND she hasn't been properly labelling the boxes. Yes, she's identifying which room they go in, but she hasn't been listing the contents on the outside like a normal person. Right now she has something like five boxes labelled "desk stuff." Not only that, but she is using up so much money's worth of packing supplies (paper and bubble wrap and the like) that we ran out after she packed fewer than four boxes of dishes from her china cabinet. I was honestly flummoxed when she said we'd run out this morning. I expected her to use some of it before I came home, but ALL of it? Good fucking Lord. *screams in frustration*

At least she has agreed to buy more packing supplies for us tomorrow and picked up more bubble wrap and paper today (she also went through half of that, which is mind-boggling to me), because so far I have paid for everything in this move: the supplies, the movers, and the professional organizer, not to mention the house itself and the lawyer's fees. So it's nice that she's finally contributing a bit. She has plans to pitch in for moving costs using her tax return, which she still hasn't submitted for last year's taxes (she is also terrible at filing her taxes on time), but that won't happen until at least next week, so I'm not counting on that.

In short, I am trying to stay out of her way while she packs, and am concentrating on other areas of the house. I lost a lot of packing time to all of the legal and financial shenanigans over the past few days, but I have very generous friends coming tomorrow to help, so I am going to ask them to help KK pack up the kitchen, and I am going to give explicit instructions on how to label the boxes so that I know what's in them when we move. Then while they're working on the main floor I will tackle my bedroom and the "cat room.," which is mostly books and my office supplies. If I work very hard I might be able to get the "cat room" completely done and put a significant dent in my bedroom. I really hope so, because otherwise I basically only have Wednesday to get everything else packed up, because Thursday we'll be loading up the U-Haul truck I rented to bring the aforementioned stuff to the property, and Friday is moving day, so 99% of the packing needs to be done before Friday morning hits.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that, while I was gone today, Pixie busted out of her collar in the back yard and took off after a rabbit. KK messaged me to let me know it happened, and of course I was still 30 minutes away and could do fuck-all about it. Luckily KK was able to find her pretty quickly and entice her into the car once she'd run herself ragged. That shaved another few years off my life too, stupid dog. It would have been just our luck for her to be hit by a car and killed mere days before she gets a whole four acres to romp around. Christ.

I am going to stop here. I was so stressed out last night that I didn't fall asleep until nearly 1:00am, and as a result I am completely fried today. So I'm going to try to be asleep before 11:00pm. That's not super early by my standards anyway, but it's nearly 10:00pm now, so I can't expect miracles.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I am at work all day for 12 hours, and I can do absolutely nothing about the packing or the bank or the sellers' inability to provide documentation in a timely manner. So, rather than angst about it, I am distracting myself during the down times at work by watching The Handmaid's Tale. 

I started watching it when it first aired in 2017, because I read the book well over 20 years ago (sometime in 2003, if memory serves), and while at the time I hadn't developed as many critical thinking skills and also lacked a lot of the historical knowledge of the real-life atrocities that informed Atwood when she wrote it, I still remember thinking how eerily plausible it all was. 

There are lots of themes and through lines that are worth exploring that I haven't fully thought through yet. There's the ritualized subjugation and infantilization of women, learned and acquired helplessness. There are themes of collaboration, what is means to be complicit in your own oppression (complying in advance, complying after the fact in order to survive, and exploiting the system for one's own gain on both small and large scales). There are themes of secrecy and lies, betrayal and loyalty, and what they all mean when living under an oppressive regime. There's also a lot to examine about the rules of society--who is allowed to break them and who isn't.

I do really like the writing when it comes to the characters and the plot taking place in the present time of the show. If I had unlimited time and brain bandwidth I'd want to do deeper dives into many of the characters, mostly the women but also some of the men: Serena, June/Offred, Emily/Ofglenn, Janine/Ofwarren, Fred Waterford, Joseph Lawrence, Aunt Lydia, and plenty of others.

Where I start having trouble is the world building. Atwood's novel is written in the epistolary style, strictly from the point of view of Offred, who is given no other name in the book, and encapsulates a very limited moment in time--the duration of her stay with the Waterfords (I don't remember if that's what they're called in the book). There is an metafictional epilogue which reveals the whole novel into a conceit that we are observing historical documents, a primary source no less, of a historical period that has come and gone. Gilead has been gone for 200 years, we are told, and very few records remain of its existence.

The show necessarily has to deviate from that after the first season, which follows the novel reasonably closely if my memory serves (which, honestly, it does not serve well these days, so I could be mistaken). The show therefore has to start doing its own world building, and honestly Gilead doesn't hold up particularly well under too close scrutiny. Here's a list of my issues, in no particular order:

- The economy. How the fuck does anything work if suddenly 55% of the working population doesn't work anymore? At higher levels, the loss of institutional knowledge would be pretty devastating, and at lower levels the loss of personnel would be even worse. Women have always been part of the workforce, even when inequality was at its worst. They've been labourers, factory workers, secretaries, assistants, and with increasing equality they have occupied every single rank and position in society. You can't declare all of that illegal overnight and not create a huge, chaotic vacuum. That's never addressed in the show.

- The rules governing women. We are apparently meant to believe that society transitioned pretty quickly and smoothly into one in which women are not allowed to work, not allowed to have their own money or bank accounts, aren't allowed to read, and are rounded up and put into re-education centres according to whichever "class" they've been assigned to (Wife, Handmaid, Martha, Aunt, Econowife). We see some protests initially which are violently put down (armed men gunning down protesters with automatic weapons), and then we just never see anything else from that time period. There is no mention of how these centres were initially set up, nor whose buy-in was required for that. The Aunts run the centres, we are given to understand, but who trained them in the first place? To get a system that regimented takes a lot of time and a lot of practice, and getting all of the centres across Gilead to adhere to the same SOPs must be an administrative nightmare.

- Societal structures and systems. At one point in Season 2 Commander Waterford yells at his wife to call 9-1-1, and that made me wonder who the fuck is still staffing all these institutions, and how they're still running apparently smoothly after removing half the workforce. See my first point about the economy. I worked as a dispatcher and telecomms operator for nearly two decades, and more than half my coworkers were women. We were already short-staffed and stretched thin, and finding qualified candidates to work was time-consuming and incredibly lengthy. Multiply this across every police force across a nation, every other 24-hour centre you don't even know exists. The people in charge of Gilead have completely upended the order of things, have done away with most modern technology, but we're meant to believe that 911 still works? It stretches credulity, at the very least.

- Then there's the costuming. It was established in the book and preserved in the show, and visually it's extremely striking. However it makes no sense from any perspective other than "it looks really cool." Coordinating identical outfits for literally millions of women across an entire country? Come on. If it were local to one city I might be more inclined to believe it, but nation-wide? No. For one thing, there would have to be an extremely long transition period while they get all of the outfits designed and then produced. Also, who is physically making these outfits? We're meant to believe that Gilead has protectionist policies, so they're not outsourcing to another country like China, but in the former USA/now Gilead, the vast, vast majority of sewists would have been women, who are now not allowed to work. Are you telling me that they somehow trained up a bunch of willing men to do "women's work?" Or are we meant to believe that people in each household are expected to sew their own outfits? If so, why do they all look mass produced and not like some terrible homemade hodge-podge?

- The costuming has a secondary problem, which is that it provides the women with too much anonymity. This is demonstrated over and over and over in the show. June/Offred routinely is able to run around and disguise her movements simply by donning the uniform of a different class of woman: either a Wife or a Martha. Each uniform grants her a layer of protection, either through privilege or invisibility. And as June herself says toward the end of Season 1: "They should have never given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army." I am reasonably sure that at least one or two of the organizers of the movement would have thought of this. 

- Last but not least, a pet peeve of mine: everyone is constantly miserable. The thing is, this is absolutely contrary to human nature. Yes, under oppressive regimes there is always an undercurrent of fear and constant paranoia about who might be about to report you to the State. But humans aren't built to be somber 24/7: they will take every opportunity for celebrations, small and large. They make food and they hang out over cups of tea or get together for illicit parties. There is so little joy in The Handmaid's Tale, and the vast majority of group encounters are weirdly manufactured and ritualized. Like, where is the secret underground dance party like in Titanic? Why doesn't Offred ever sit and gossip over a cup of tea with Rita after so many months of living under the same roof, even if it's surface-level nonsense? 

 

:::ETA:::

I am back with more thoughts that I forgot about.

- What about the future? Particularly the future Handmaids. In the present, Handmaids are picked specifically because they successfully bore a living child in the past. What is the plan for the next generation of women? There's no telling which little girl will be able to bear children successfully, so what is the plan for them? Only two classes of women can potentially have children (unless you count some of the Jezebels), the Handmaids and the Econowives, should the latter be lucky enough to be fertile, and the Handmaids' babies are of course given to the Wives. Who in the next generation will be picked to be a Wife, a Handmaid, or a Martha? Or any class of woman, for that matter? The whole system falls apart within a generation, because what Wife would allow her daughter to become a Handmaid? Even a Martha would be an unthinkable fall in station. So that leaves only the children of the Econowives who'd have to be divvied up, and that seems unsustainable to me.
 

Anyway, thank you for putting up with all my Handmaid's Tale thinky thoughts. Maybe one day I'll get back to the other characters I mentioned, or some of the more interesting themes. We shall see.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I'm not even going to attempt a full post today, because I am tired but mostly frustrated. Here is a list, in some semblance of order.

1- Brittany the professional organizer only stayed half a day due to not feeling well. Not a huge problem, and I'm not going to force someone to work when they're sick. It turned out to have a silver lining, too, as you will see.

2- The real estate lawyer finally contacted me, and told me my appointment to get everything signed, sealed, and delivered is tomorrow afternoon.

3- The lawyer casually informed me that I'd need a bank draft ready by tomorrow (less than 24 hours' notice). If she'd answered any of my emails last week or earlier this week I might have had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the money out of my various accounts, but as it stands, 24 is not nearly enough time.

4- I forfeited my afternoon chasing after all my bank stuff, and have only sort of managed to get it sorted. It took hours and an in-person visit to one of the branches, and I most likely still won't be able to get everything by tomorrow. It's like the lawyer who specializes in real estate has no idea how banks work.

5- I spent the remaining time on the phone with insurance companies, because my current insurer wanted to charge me nearly $800 a month for my home insurance, which is WILD. It's more than a mortgage payment! Just bonkers.

6- My mortgage person called and needs more documents signed.

7- My internet provider called to let me know that, contrary to what they told us, they do NOT service the area we're moving to, so I won't have internet service starting next Friday.

I am wiped out. I have no idea if the lawyers will accept the situation as it is, and if they don't I may end up with no house, after spending a lot of time and energy and getting emotionally invested, and I just don't know how to feel about it all right now. I am tired and frustrated and filled with anxiety because there is nothing I can do beyond what I've already done and hope for the best.

So that was today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I'm writing from the future! *ooOooOooh* *spooky future noises*

I was so exhausted after yesterday's packing session that I could barely string two words together. I had to have a guy come in and replace the water meter first, and that was a whole ordeal of trying to corral the dogs and run the water and supervise the guy while he was in my basement. He took longer than I thought he would, so I had to request that Brittany, the professional organizer, delay her start time by half an hour.

We cleared out a huge chunk of the garage yesterday. There was so much recycling and garbage, it was actually pretty shocking. I think a lot of stuff had just gotten tossed in there to be dealt with later and then just never got dealt with. Also KK has a tendency to squirrel away garbage and recycling in various unexpected containers and then not tell me about it, so that I get a garbage-y surprise when I open said container months (or in this case, years) later. None of it was perishable, luckily, so it was just a matter of getting rid of it.

Yesterday was garbage day, but we have a three-item limit for garbage pickup, otherwise you have to buy very expensive city-produced yellow garbage bags, and I did have some on hand, which I bought knowing we'd likely need them for the move. I had bought two packs of four, and we filled five bags, which are annoyingly difficult to tie, incidentally. There's also a bunch of larger things that wouldn't fit in a garbage can and therefore count as "large" items. Each "large" item counts against your three-item limit for pickup, and you can't arrange for extra pickup for those, so I will be taking all this stuff to the dump, probably on Friday. 

I thought there would be more packing involved with the garage, but it turned out that once I cleared out all the garbage and recycling, what was left was already mostly packed up or not the kind of thing to be boxed up anyway. So that was a bit of a relief. There's still some work to be done: I have to empty the small pantry and also empty and defrost the freezer, but that will be a job for next week, especially the freezer. The small pantry can be packed into a couple of boxes pretty easily.

I wanted to take a very hot shower after I was done, but KK left to go to the pharmacy and decided to run the dishwasher, which meant I couldn't take a shower until well after she was back. I must say, the hot water felt glorious after the day spent clearing out the garage. I collapsed into a puddle in my bed after dinner, and that was the end of it. I did remember that I should post an update, but I decided it wasn't worth losing more sleep, and that I would backdate an entry today once Brittany was gone, which is what I have done!

 Work has been kind of wild tonight. I'm working the AVSEC desk and I've had weird breaches and a case of arson and one airport employee meeting a Tindr date next to one of the departure gates. I'd blame the full moon, except that that was several days ago (and that was also a bit of a wild weekend!). I guess someone just spiked the water with something tonight.

I decided to take a relaxing break from watching Law & Order: SVU by watching The Purge movies. I am partway through the second one. I watched them once before, many years ago (the most recent one is from 2016), and I'd forgotten how much the premise makes so very little sense. I think it's because whoever conceptualized and wrote it didn't really think it all the way through. I have been trying to figure out how it could work, and honestly it just doesn't. The writer put a lot of emphasis on the fact that every crime is allowed during this 12-hour period, including murder, as if murder and violence is what most people aspire to. The Purge announcement over TV/radio/etc. also makes a big deal out of how murder is allowed, and therein lies the central weakness of the narrative.

The idea, of course, is that the poor and marginalized, the "undesirables" will either kill each other off, or be killed off by wealthier people with better access to weapons and hired mercenaries or whatever. And yeah, sure, there might be some of that in reality, but I don't think it holds true of most marginalized people. If anything, they are the ones most likely to engage in mutual aid and take part in a more unofficial economy. Also, while I'm sure there are wealthy people who'd take advantage of things, I rather think they'd be too concerned about preserving their property to really get into that much trouble themselves.

Also, straight-up murder is just so unimaginative, and humanity can get super creative with their crimes. Why go outside and run the risk of physical injury when you can hack into a bank, or government systems? You could transfer a bunch of money into your accounts, or cancel your student loans (or everyone's student loans!) Why wouldn't every organized crime group arrange to move vast amounts of drugs during that night with no repercussions?

What would stop the powerful people at the helm of institutions from committing collapse-inducing crimes? A bank CEO just cleaning out his entire bank, or a government official selling every single national security secret available to foreign powers. It's not treason during Purge Night! If even a few dozen people committed large-scale crimes, it could absolutely collapse the nation in short order. 

And then there's the issue of the emergency services. According to the premise, they are unavailable during the twelve hours of Purge Night, which makes a certain amount of sense: people would target any first responders getting in the way of their crimes. If you're murdering someone, you want them dead. That all holds up until you get to the fire department. The movies don't (to my knowledge, I could be misremembering) show any kind of arson, and you cannot convince me that there wouldn't be pyromaniacs and overexcited teenagers setting fire to shit all over the place. You know what fire does? It spreads. So why aren't entire neighbourhoods wiped out by fire on Purge Night, since there are no firefighters to keep the blazes under control?

Another thing that bugs me about the movies is that they focus exclusively on urban settings. It definitely works better for the plot, but a lot of the USA is either rural or at least from small towns. Does the Purge even happen there? Would people attack farms? You could set fire to all of the USA's food supply and, again, cause some pretty significant societal damage.

In short, the writer did not think this through, and just created a hyper-violent but ultimately unimaginative premise that doesn't really prompt the audience to think about the broader societal issues underpinning the story. It just boils down to "murder and violence bad," as if we didn't know that already.

Okay, thank you for bearing with my rambling thoughts about The Purge franchise. ;) Catch you on the flip side, friends!

You know, if all that was required of me to be successful in life was making plans, I would be acing this whole "being a successful human" thing. I love making plans, the more detailed, the better. The problem, of course, is that to actually succeed at things, you have to enact said plans, and that is where everything kind of falls apart for me.

KK kind of falls into the same category as me, and we are pretty terrible about enabling each other at making plans and then following through on maybe 10% of them. To be fair, it's a lot of fun to make plans, and I don't mind too much if all the low-stakes, castles-in-Spain plans don't come to fruition. It's actually really fun to talk about these things and throw ideas back and forth and build it up in our imaginations. I don't know if she is quite as aware as I am that our reach might exceed our grasp in a lot of cases, but I suspect she is.

I am also well aware of my propensity to make grand plans to completely turn my life around while I'm working night shifts (I talked about in in a previous post a few weeks ago, during another round of night shifts), and I have just come to accept it as one of my brain's quirky little ways of generating dopamine, so I just let it happen now and try not to convince myself that this time will totally be different, no, really! As long as I can accept that this is just an exercise in making my brain go *brrrt*, and that I have no expectations of actually doing anything about it, then it's a harmless little pastime during slower night shifts.

Right now I am trying to make sensible plans for packing up the house next week. Working 12-hour shifts this weekend means I won't get anything done, and there is no sense in deluding myself into thinking that I will somehow manage to do anything other than sleep and go to work. My current ambitious plan is to try to get a lot of packing done on Monday, when normally I'd spend a chunk of the day sleeping after my night shift. Don't get me wrong, I will still sleep when I get home, but it will be more of a two-hour power nap and then I'll aim to go to bed very early as a way of shifting over my sleep schedule as quickly as possible.

Tuesday through Thursday I've hired the professional organizer I had hired back in... March? I think? *checks calendar* Nope, first week of April. ANYWAY. I have hired her to come for six hours a day to help me pack up the garage and, if there's enough time, the basement. I am reasonably confident that I can pack up the upstairs on my own (minus KK's room and bathroom), and if I have friends able and willing to help pack the kitchen and dining room, that will also be really helpful. I might be able to do it on my own, but only time will tell.

So far most of the coworkers I have asked for a shift switch have said no, which is sad but not unexpected. I have two coworkers left who might be able to help me out. One is coming in for a shift today, and the other won't be in until Monday, so if the first one says no I'll just have to log into my email account from home to see if the second is willing to take one for the team. He very well might, since I agreed to swap weekends with him back in November so he could take his wife to go see Taylor Swift in Toronto, but it will of course be dependent on whether he has other commitments lined up already. Getting the weekend off to pack would be ideal, but if I can't get it, I will cope.

I have set one boundary with regards to the packing with KK, and that's that I expect her to pack up her own shit. I am by far the more able-bodied of the two of us, so I don't mind that I'm probably going to end up packing up most of the house on my own. I need her to still be physically functional by the time moving day arrives, so I'm perfectly willing to take that on. What I am not willing to take on, however, is packing up her office or her bedroom or her bathroom. Those three rooms are all on her, and I told her that many weeks ago. Like me, she hasn't started packing yet, but I don't plan on bailing her out at the last minute. Whatever she hasn't packed is just going to get left behind, and she can figure out how to get it delivered to the house. The chances of her not being ready in time are not super high, but they're also not zero, either. But I can't be responsible for myself, the whole house, the pets, AND her stuff. So she gets to be responsible for that.

Somewhere in the next ten days I am going to lose at least half a day to attend the closing for the house. I haven't heard from the lawyer, come to think of it, so I'll shoot them an email to make sure everything is still good on that front, or if they need more information from me or something. Great. Another thing to be paranoid about. Well, at least it should be a relatively easy fix, and it's 10 days before my official closing date (and more than one business week), so hopefully there's nothing to worry about. Anyway, I assume the closing will be done at the lawyer's office in Cornwall, so I'll have to drive out there and back, and even if it takes an hour or less to sign all the paperwork, it means at least a three hour trip, possibly longer.

I think it's still doable, God help me. I may just be deluding myself, but I am an incurable optimist when it comes to these things. I guess we'll find out!

All right, time to close out this night shift. I have a little over two hours left before I can go home and get some sleep. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

 I have spent all of this shift halfway convinced that it's my third night shift instead of my second. I think it's the fact that I've already been working for nine days straight that makes it feel like it's later in the week than it actually is. I still have five more nights to go, including the 12-hour weekend shifts. I am not really looking forward to any of it, but it is what it is.

I managed to get about six hours of sleep and probably would have slept longer had I not had to get up early for my therapy appointment. I have made the grievous error of agreeing to multiple meetings and appointments this week. I keep trying to not schedule stuff during my evening and night shifts, and I keep failing abysmally. It's just never a good idea, but sometimes there just isn't another choice. Alas.

So later today I have a meeting with tow members of Ministry & Counsel about a small worship group one of them wants to start centered around chronic illness, and on Friday I am going to my new credit union to sign my life away in order to qualify for a reduced interest rate on my new mortgage. Okay, I exaggerate slightly for effect, but essentially I have to switch over to a checking account with the credit union and have my pay direct deposited there in order to qualify.

I've sent out feelers to my coworkers to see if anyone will trade my weekend day shifts in 10 days with me. Getting the weekend off to be able to focus on packing would be a godsend, but I'm not going to hold my breath. People are pretty accommodating at my workplace, but we're getting into summer vacation time and people are a busier with kids and commitments and stuff. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

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*

I am too old for this little sleep in a night. KK was still awake when I got home, so we ended up chatting for a while before I went to bed, so I only got about three hours of sleep before I had to get up and get ready for work again. Blaaaaargh.

The connectivity issue at work is resolved, at least, and the night shift surprised us by Jerry-rigging things together a bit and managing to log a bunch of the calls and emails from yesterday, thus sparing my current shift partner and I having to go through the entire backlog. So, yay for amazing colleagues! I have been mopping up the rest of the issues all morning with the help of my intrepid shift partner, and now we're back to our regular baseline.

I am hoping that the next few hours go by reasonably smoothly. I am very tired and I have very little desire to do a bunch of metaphorical heavy lifting. So far so good, so we shall see how it goes.

I have a few things to do when I get home, like send out Quaker announcements and feed and water the quail, but I plan on swan diving into my bed at the earliest opportunity otherwise. Hopefully I can "catch up" on some sleep that way. I know that technically there is no such thing as catching up on sleep, but I can't think of a better way to to describe it. 

I have an appointment to take all four of my pets to the vet on Monday for their shots, so that's going to be a very expensive endeavour, but at least it will be done. We have plans to put all the pets in daycare at PetSmart on moving day so that they don't get traumatized and also so that they don't get underfoot or, in the case of the cats, get unduly traumatized by all of the goings-on. PetSmart won't take any pets that aren't fully up to date on their vaccinations (and rightly so!), so this is an expensive but necessary step.

I have been researching fencing for the new property, and Dylan and Sarah recommended against putting in chain link fence, especially if I want to try doing it myself. Apparently you need a specific piece of equipment to stretch chain link fencing, and it's a pain in the ass to install correctly. They suggested I get rolls of welded wire fencing and t-posts instead, which is much easier for a beginner to install. I looked up the prices, and it looks like I might be able to get it all done for about $1,000, rather than the $3,000 to $9,000 that it would cost to pay someone to put up the roughly 300 feet of fencing I'll be needing. I do need to figure out how to build a gate for that kind of fence, since I'd want at least one or maybe two access points (one at the front, one toward the back so I can easily get to the rest of the property), but I'm sure that can be managed. My main fear is that it will prove to be beyond my ability and then I'll have wasted a bunch of money for nothing, but I figure nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The fence will have to be a weekend project, and in the meantime I will be keeping the dogs contained (I hope) by the expedient means of a clotheline and tie-outs. It seems to work pretty well for Dylan and Sarah, but their dogs are not nearly as prone to escaping as mine. We shall see. They definitely won't be allowed outside unsupervised until such time as I am confident they won't go careening onto the neighbours' property or permanently vanish into the wilderness chasing after the wildlife. 

Okay, time to get back to work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!