Corner of Bourbon & Division

Today is Day 1 of taking only my prescribed blood pressure medication and none of the wacky supplements I've been trying in the desperate hopes that they will do something about my crushing levels of fatigue. I also didn't take any melatonin last night, which I started a while back as a way to encourage myself not to go to sleep stupidly late. I am still taking my iron supplement and Vitamin C in the evening (because low iron is not something to fuck around with), and a multivitamin in the morning, but that's it. I've cut out everything else, and there is an embarrassing amount of  it, quite frankly.

I did go to bed late, but still within acceptable parameters (around 23:30), especially given that I'm working evenings this week, so I'll actually be getting to bed after 01:00 until Saturday, since my shift ends at midnight. Back when I worked for Boomerang I really liked the evening shift, but it was 14:00 to 22:00 rather than 16:00 to 24:00, and I find that finishing at midnight really throws me off my game. However, this morning I had an appointment at 08:00 to get my car rust-proofed (past!Phnee thought this was a perfectly reasonable time to schedule things, curse her). I was pleasantly surprised at how little time it took, and a little unpleasantly surprised at the price, although I encountered that surprise many weeks ago when I was first researching rust-proofing. I also caught sight of two tiny rust spots starting on my car already, and I am deeply annoyed. I will have to contact Steve the Wonder Mechanic and arrange to have him do a hopefully itty-bitty cosmetic job come the spring. I doubt it will be like the nearly-two-month ordeal from October/November, because these two tiny spots have only just appeared and haven't been festering for, oh, six or seven years the way the previous one had been. I'm hoping it will just be a question of a bit of sanding and re-painting.

Peggy's 11:15 appointment to get her bum squished went just fine. Poor thing, she did have one impacted anal gland, and it's really quite painful to have it all cleaned out, but she was a trooper and got lots and lots of treats out of it. Our favourite vet tech is pregnant and will be going on maternity leave in a month, and we are going to miss her dearly while she's away, but we're very excited for her, as this is her first baby! I should make a note to get her a card before she leaves.

I managed to be even a little productive when I got home, which is kind of unusual for me. I cleared the kitchen sink, ran the dishwasher, and gathered up all the recycling to put in the bins outside. It's kind of depressing that this is what counts as "being productive" for me these days, but I will take even the smallest of wins these days. Then I packed up a lunch and a snack for work, crated the dogs (much to their dismay), and managed to get to work on time! Frankly, it's something of a miracle that everything got done and on time today, given my track record.

There is still no word about my composting worms. I am very disappointed. On the other hand, I wouldn't have had time to pick them up today, so I suppose that's okay. Tomorrow or even Wednesday is probably better, because I only have one commitment on those days outside of work. Thursday I theoretically only have one appointment too, but it's likely to take longer than the others, and Friday's M&C meeting could take an hour or it could take three, it kind of depends on a bunch of factors. Anyway, I guess we'll see. I will be following up by email tomorrow to see what's going on with the worms. Maybe they needed an extra business day to scoop the worms out of wherever they keep them, I don't know. Maybe they're growing a new batch of worms from scratch. ;)

KK asked me yesterday if it was still okay to call worms "hermaphrodites," since that word is considered insulting by the intersex community, and while the question was hilarious I am happy she thought about it, because I had honestly not given it any thought at all. We talked about it and landed on the conclusion that it was probably fine because worms aren't intersex the way people are, they truly do have the full sexual characteristics of each sex and are capable of reproduction both ways. But yeah, discussing the appropriate way to gender worms was not on my Bingo card for this weekend!

In the meantime, I took a few days "off" listening to audiobooks, and am back in the saddle today. What's a tiny bit frustrating is that there don't appear to be available copies of the books I'd like to listen to at my local library. As in, they don't have any copies, not that they've all been checked out. So if I want to listen to them, I think I may be forced to acquire them through Audible. BLECH. If you all have any suggestions for audiobook resources that aren't Audible/Amazon, I am all ears! Pun fully intended.

I think that's it for today. I'm going to settle in for my evening shift with my latest audiobook and hope things go smoothly.

I took the car to Steve the wonderful mechanic this morning. I took Peggy with me and we walked home, which took about an hour. Google Maps claimed it should have taken 40 minutes, but Google Maps routinely overestimates how quickly I walk. I have always been a bit of a slow walker, and never moreso than these days, tbh. I am a slowpoke, and also Peggy wanted to sniff all the things, which didn't hasten the process at all. We didn't get out to the fields the way I'd wanted to, but at least we got in a good long walk.

Unfortunately, the news about the car was not great. It turns out that the metal on my exhaust manifold has corroded until it's so thin that Steve the wonderful mechanic couldn't get any traction to unscrew the nuts and bolts to replace the part that needs replacing: the metal just warped and bent every which way. He told me he didn't want to force it because it would likely just rip itself apart and then I wouldn't be able to drive my car for two weeks. So now we need a much more expensive repair, which is basically to replace the entire manifold, but that should fix my problem, at least. So that's going to be another $600 I didn't really feel like spending on the car. Still, it's the price one pays for having a ten year old car, and she's in pretty good working order for a car that I abused royally for many of the 10 years I've had her. I went and got an oil change today, and YIKES I do not remember the last one being this expensive! Steve did the most recent one and he charges next to nothing, and I suspect the bananas amount of money I spent today is due to my going with Steve's recommendation of getting synthetic oil instead of regular. OTOH it means that I will get more life out of the old girl if I treat her well, so there you go.

Next on the list for the car is a proper cleaning (inside and out), new windshield wiper blades, and new floor mats. My current mats are in terrible shape, and not just because Peggy chewed up the ones in the back footwell when she was a puppy. ;) Project Be Nicer To Your Car is an ongoing process. 

I had a nice long chat with Lu over the phone. We caught up a bit, talked about cats, and generally had a lovely conversation. I also heard from Jan and t!, who sent me an email to let me know that their dog Carter died. Carter was a husky collie mix like Sergent, and he and Sergent were really good buddies while Sergent was alive. Carter would have been fifteen this year, which is a good long life for a dog of his breeding, and he spent the last few days with his humans being loved on and fed all of the treats, and he went peacefully and painlessly. I am selfishly a little sad that I wasn't able to see him for such a long time before he died (stupid pandemic), but this is the way life goes.

And now, it is time for Mage. Catch you later, folks!

Today started with the guy meant to be delivering (and installing!) our new printer calling me to tell me that property security weren't allowing him on the grounds because he "wasn't cleared." ARGH. This isn't some random delivery dude, he's a specialized tech for a secure network belonging to a government partner. It took 45 minutes to get that sorted out, which is 45 minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

The day kind of went downhill from there, culminating in a technological malfunction causing a data loss that we can only PRAY is not going to compromise a national security investigation. GAH. 

The employee drama seems to have sorted itself out, at least, which is nice.

The best news of the week so far is that we seem to have FINALLY fixed my employees pay issues. All of the back pay she's owed should be deposited into her account tomorrow, and all of the various pay people have sworn on their children's heads that the system correctly reflects her current pay rate. So once we confirm tomorrow that she got paid all of her money, I will be able to say with a reasonable degree of confidence that the problem is resolved. I won't call it good, because anything can happen, but there is every reason for optimism right now.

I haven't gotten anything done at work this week that I planned to do, so it feels like I got nothing done. Objectively that isn't true of course. I've been dealing with the fallout from the system migration this whole time, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

In news unrelated to work for once, my darling car mechanic Steve finally got back to me, and we are a GO for car maintenance this weekend. The General Service Vehicle: Congenital Optimist (that's the car's name, for more recent readers--I used Iain M. Banks' naming convention) is long overdue for some TLC. I'm getting a new-to-me alternator (technically it's an after-market one, but Steve is confident that it will work well for me, and it has a three year warranty, which is good), a new timing belt, new spark plugs, a complete replacement of the transmission and power steering fluid, a thorough check and servicing of the brakes (we will set up another appointment if they need to be replaced), an oil change, and the application of a protective lubricant on my poor patch of rust to keep it from spreading until such time as we can find someone to do the body work for me.

I won't have the car for the whole weekend, and it's not going to be cheap, but it's going to be MUCH cheaper than if I go to the dealership or Canadian Tire, and Steve does excellent work. My goal this year is to get the car into the best shape possible and keep maintaining it for as long as possible. I toyed with the idea of trading in the GSVCO and getting a larger car or even (ugh) an SUV of sorts in anticipation of moving further out in the country: having something with more torque and more cargo space would definitely come in handy. That being said, the math of getting a new vehicle convinced me that sticking with my trusty steed for several years longer makes much more sense. I own the GSVCO outright, and she is very good on gas, which means my main expenditure every month is insurance (which is bananas in Ontario, for the record). Getting a larger vehicle means hundreds more dollars a month just to pay for the silly thing, and probably hundreds in gas.

So right now it's much more cost effective to just do a bunch of preventive maintenance. Come the springtime I'm going to do a few cosmetic upgrades too. Nothing fancy, just new floor mats, maybe find a way to fix up some of the nicks and scratches in the paint (they are all very small), things like that. I'm also going to investigate new all season tires and maybe get them already mounted on rims if I can. All very boring stuff if you're not me, but I'm low-key excited at my newfound understanding of care and feeding of my motor vehicle.

On that note, it is time for care and maintenance of the Phnee, which means bedtime. Here I go.

Had a great night with sultrysong yesterday, even though we both ended up going to bed much later than intended. By the time I turned out my lights it was nearly 1:00, and I didn't manage to sleep past 9:00 this morning. So, yeah, eight hours of sleep, but that's going to translate to 4 hours of sleep per day when spread out over the course of last night and tonight. *sigh*

Still, it was worth every minute. We ordered pizza, had a beer (only one, in spite of what my icon might imply!), and since she's on a business trip we got to claim it as an expense. The only thing better than beer is free beer, am I right? We spent the entire time chatting and catching up on our lives, and had a grand time.

I am not looking forward to the next few days, though. I have an appointment to get my tires changed on Friday, which means I'll only get about three hours of sleep then, and then I have to drive back to Ottawa on Saturday evening for an overtime shift on Sunday. Don't get me wrong, the extra money will be great, but there's going to be very little sleep for me in the foreseeable future.

I haven't heard back from Home Depot yet about getting an estimate for the new fence, so if there's nothing by tomorrow I'm going to call them and hassle them a bit. I really want to get that fence up ASAP. I'm hoping to get the yard completely cleared this weekend. I don't know how long the tire change will take on Friday (I'm guessing about an hour and a half to two hours), which will put me at home around 17:00. If I play my cards right I'll still have some daylight hours after dinner, and there should also be some time on Saturday for that sort of work. Of course, we're having a garage sale on Saturday if the weather permits, so I'm going to have to juggle that at the same time. At least this year Bean is unlikely to need to be brought to the ER during the garage sale. :P

I'm quite sure I had more to say than this, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. So I guess I'll leave this entry as it is. I can always come back and update again later, right?

Today's good news: I did NOT die when my car fishtailed on black ice on the highway. The road conditions were so shitty, I can't even. Blowing snow, slush everywhere, and black ice. A trifecta of shitty road conditions. Everyone was driving 30 or 40 kph under the speed limit, and it still felt way too fast. There were accidents everywhere, and it was as I was slowing down to accommodate two vehicles that had pulled over that I lost control of my own car.

Good news #2: I am a rockstar who pulled my car out of said fishtail even when it spun just short of 280 degrees in either direction. I also managed not to hit the truck in front of me OR the car behind me. The car went partially off the road, but I managed to straighten myself out and get back in the right direction with no damage to anyone.

Good news #3: I am a rockstar who did NOT vomit on herself or wet herself while this all took place.

Good news #4: I am a rockstar who managed to wait until I was safely on the side of the road with my hazard lights on in order to hyperventilate.

Good news #5: I didn't cry. (Actually, I've noticed that lately, no matter how upset I am at anything, I never seem to cry. Maybe my tear ducts/crying reflexes are broken)

Bad news: It took nearly 4 1/2 hours to make a trip that should last a little under 2.

Bad news #2: I think I shaved 10 years off my life.

Bad news #3: Some jackass damaged my bumper in the Walmart parking lot. I haven't had the car two weeks without it getting all banged up again!

There was a LOT of swearing. I am still swearing in my head.

I'm going to take the GSVCO to a body shop this week to see if they can maybe just pop the offending bit back into place. Criminey.

It's nearly 9pm and we still have two dishes left to cook. Aie.

We got to a late start this morning, since everyone was bone tired. pdaughter and I got up at 7:00 instead of the usual 6:00 or 6:30 (though I think she was awake before then), and then Bean had to be prepped for school, breakfast had to be procured, etc. We also had a few items missing for the cooking day from yesterday, which we ended up picking up over the course of the day as needed.

In the category of Phnee Is A Colossal Fuckup, we had a bit of a chicken disaster; i.e. I cooked more of the chicken than I was supposed to cook beforehand. A LOT. Like, we're talking inability to do basic math AND complete lack of reading comprehension on my part. It's as if I read the paper and my brain said: "Nope! We're not doing that!" and did something completely different.

pdaughter helped me go through the recipes, and we managed to salvage the situation without my having to go out and buy a ton more chicken to get us through the day, but it was a close call, and we still have a bunch of cooked chicken that we need to figure out what to do with.

This is my brain. It is full of metaphorical holes. We had about five different conversations today that went: "We have talked about this before. We agreed on it. You [i.e. me] stood there and nodded your head and told me it was a good idea, and now you have no idea what I'm talking about." So poor pdaughter is frustrated beyond words, because she doesn't want to treat me like an idiot, but it sort of ends up that way if she assumes I'll forget everything we talk about. I have a doctor's appointment on February 19th, so now it's just a countdown until the day I'll be able to ask a medical professional about this stupid memory/cognitive fuckery. (No, autocorrect, I did NOT mean "fakery," stop changing it!)

Otherwise, today has been super pleasant. I love cooking, even though these marathon sessions are exhausting. If I ever win the lottery, I plan to spend my days writing and cooking and maybe gardening. Possibly knitting occasionally. I also got my car back from the shop, which is awesome. It's so weird to see the GSCVO without the huge dent in her bumper, but I like the look. It's very sleek.

I will have a longer, more detailed food porn post about the cooking day later on, complete with photographs. We're still cooking, though, so that will likely happen tomorrow. Bean is in bed and quiet after a late bedtime (naps really mess with his sleep schedule, alas), and so now we need to put together those last two dishes and stash everything away in various freezers in the house.

I am looking at the coming week, and it's making my head spin a little.

Work is making me stay late tomorrow for a 5pm mandatory meeting. I am unreasonably annoyed by this, because even if they are paying me overtime (double time for the first time in my life!), that time is mine and why couldn't they at least schedule it in the morning so as not to mess up my whole day? D:

That means that I won't be home until probably 9:30 or even 10pm, and that annoys me too. For one, I really like being home before Bean's bedtime so I can see him before he has to rush off to daycare the next morning. For another, the temperature is meant to go up tomorrow, and I wanted to get out there and shovel the snow off the back balcony before it freezes again. At 10pm I'm pretty sure it will be too late, though I intend to get out there and try, at the very least.

Tuesday morning I'm bringing in the car to be repaired. I don't know if I mentioned the minor fender-bender in which I was involved on December 4th, but the short version is that I'm getting the bumper replaced on my vehicle. Yay! Ish. The appointment is for just before 8am, so that means I have to be up early (well, for variable definitions of early: compared to waking up at 4am for work, this feels like sleeping in!) in order to get there on time.

The rest of Tuesday will be taken up with errands and grocery shopping and ingredient preparation for a cooking day on Wednesday, and in the evening I'm meeting up with the Capricornucopia boys to talk scripts and get this year's show on the road. That means another late-ish night, and likely another night of not being there for Bean's bedtime, which sucks but can't be helped. Capricornucopia is once a year, and that time of year is necessarily busier as a result. Besides, it's always so much fun when it all comes together that it's well worth it.

Wednesday is the big cooking day that pdaughter and I have planned for the month. Last year we had a few very successful cooking days, using the menus from Once A Month Meals, formerly known as Once A Month Mom. The idea is to do enough freezer cooking to last an entire month. It's no longer free, alas, but we signed up for a month and are busily downloading as many of the menus and recipes as we can, and Wednesday will be our first trial run with us both living in the same house. Beforehand it was always a little complicated because we had to work out transportation and Bean-wrangling, among other things. Wednesday, though, Bean will be at daycare most of the day, so we'll be able to get a lot done without worrying that he's swinging from the chandeliers somewhere. ;) Or, more accurately, coming into the kitchen to try to "help," which more often than not includes shoving his hands between the produce I'm chopping and the extremely sharp knife I'm wielding. /o\

Then Thursday it'll be time to do my weekly cleaning of the kitchen and bathroom, do some laundry, then turn around and head back to Ottawa. Busy-busy-busy.

So I found him basking in the sunon one of the chairs in the garden when I got home today. He's skinny and covered in dandruff and looking a mite the worse for wear. He made a beeline for his food dish and is now cuddled up with me on my bed, yowling at regular intervals, demanding pats. The other cats are hissing at him.

Cats. I swear to God.


Oh, and I got a car.

It's a good day. \o/

The daffodils are out in the garden. I am very pleased. :)

I have to do some planning for what the rest of the garden is going to do. I learned a lot last year, but I'm getting a really late start this year due to having had a crappy winter, mood-wise and schedule-wise. So once more I'm going to be going with plantings from Atwater Market. I think next year ought to present a better opportunity for growing things from seed.

Also, I got a car! I'll be picking it up next Thursday. I'm very pleased. Photos will be forthcoming. Now I need to think of a name for it. I've been toying with the Iain M. Banks Culture naming conventions.

Supernatural is still rocking my world, although last night's episode was unexpectedly sad. :(

My recycling box is gone. Woe! Another thing I have to put on my to-do list. Poor recycling box, sacrificed to the gods of snow removal. It figures that something like this would happen just as I'm trying to be more environmentally responsible.

Had to get up stupidly early to move the car yesterday, only to have them *not* remove the snow. Got up stupidly early today for the same reason, but they appear to be following through on the snow removal thing now, which makes me feel better. I know they're overworked, but that doesn't make me any less tired for it.

At some point, when my energy comes back (hah!) I am going to start researching all my local government-type folk (municipal, provincial and federal) and start writing stern letters about environmentalism, social development, and all that sort of good stuff. I just have to figure out who to write to.

Just got happy election stuff in the mail. I am officially registered to vote in the upcoming provincial election. Too bad none of the candidates is one I feel comfortable voting for. Theoretically there's a green candidate in my riding, but he/she/it hasn't seen fit to even send out leaflets, so I have no idea who they are. Bah. I should go poke them, but I don't know when I'll have time to do that. Gotta make time, I suppose.

I have made cream of wheat this morning, and added apples and cinnamon. I think it ought to taste quite good. *tests* Yep. Excellent. Can't think why this didn't occur to me before.

I've noticed a trend among the more modern sci fi shows to have other humans as the worst kind of enemy. Been watching Battlestar Galactica right on the heels of Babylon 5, and thus can't help but see parallels between Clark and Cain. Part of me is glad that it's not just the aliens that are the bad guys (or the Cylons, who are alien by extension), and another part of me is thinking "Oh God, not again!" I think it's just because the kind of shows I watch tend to pose the larger questions, and so the same motifs return. I doubt very much that most of mainstream American television would make it very clear that torturing prisoners is a bad thing. I'm thinking, in this case, of 24, in which our heroes routinely turn to torture as a means of extracting information because they "don't have time for this."

I don't know where I'm going with that. I was just struck by it.

That's it for now, I think.