mousme | Entries tagged with castles in spain

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!

Current Mood: optimistic

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!

Current Mood: busy

Yes, I am absolutely writing this post during my work hours. Shh. More seriously, I don't think my boss cares particularly what I do as long as my work gets completed promptly and accurately, so I'm safe on that front. Today so far hasn't been a super busy day. Currently the only important thing going on is some ongoing tests for a distress alert on a specific vessel, and while that requires me to be responsive, it's not particularly labour intensive. I am most of the way through my shift, and rather looking forward to going home.

I'm writing my update early today in the hopes of shaving off the time spent on it in the evening. Yesterday, after I finished writing I went upstairs and got sort of waylaid by KK who had approximately seven thousand things she wanted to discuss, and the next thing I knew it was 11:30pm and all my good intentions about going to bed early had gone out the window. KK is very much a night owl, but I am not, and I cannot function on that little sleep. To be fair, neither can she, but she has fewer negative consequences for it than I do. For instance, her workplace is pretty tolerant of her taking a mid-work nap, whereas where I work we don't even get a lunch break. If she oversleeps then she can choose to work from home that day and make it up another day, but I have people waiting for me to take over their operations desk, so I can't afford to oversleep or be late.

So I am trying to lessen the number of things to do right before bed, and updating my little daily blog is one of them. I still want to keep writing a little bit every day, so really it will just depend on what else I have going on that day: what shift I'm working, what other errands and chores I have planned, etc. I have technically broken my streak once, on the Saturday I got the quail, and that's only because I got home so late and then had to set up the quail in their new home, that by the time I got around to updating it was already technically Sunday. Oops. I decided that didn't count, because in shift-work logic, it's not the next day until you've gone to sleep and woken up again. :P

The second night with the CPAP went a little less well. I was perhaps a bit less tired than the day before, due to working from home, and so I was more aware of the mask being on my face during the night. The head strap was also a little loose and kept shifting up on my head, so I awoke a couple of times to pull it back down. Overall, though, the night went by fine, and tonight I will tighten the strap and hope it dos the trick. The CPAP noted that I had something like 1.2 events per hour, which is even better than yesterday, so I'm counting it a win.

I have lost the habit of meal planning for the week, and really need to start that up again. I don't have a plan for tonight yet. I am going to skip making ground chicken to spare me and KK the same thing for a million days in a row, but otherwise I haven't thought it through at all. I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something on the fly, but I saved myself a lot of time and hassle and mental bandwidth by planning ahead. I also have a lot of stuff in our freezers I'd like to get through before we move, so that I don't have to worry about moving that much frozen food over a long distance on the same day. I will have to especially focus on the large chest freezer and see what I can get rid of in there (there are a few things KK brought with her that I've never touched that I'm pretty sure she's forgotten about entirely) and what I can cook up in the next few weeks so that I can then empty it completely and then defrost it in anticipation of the move. We won't be able to get through everything that's in all the chest freezers, because I purposefully built up our food reserves to last for three to four months, but I think I can get it to a more manageable level for the move.

I am determined to find a ladder and get over myself about packing for the move this weekend. I've been meaning to pack the living room area for a week now, and keep not doing it, so I'm changing tactics. This weekend I shall pack up the basement, or as much of it as I can humanly manage. The good news is that a lot of it is already in Rubbermaid bins, so realistically all I have to do is label them and stack them neatly. I plan on dismantling most of the shelving, and getting as much of it squared away in order to make room for more packing boxes. The only thing I won't be able to pack away right off is my computer and computer desk, and the latter won't fit in the new house. I don't know yet if I'm going to try to hang onto it and maybe set it up in the little workshop area, or if I should sell it or give it away. It's pretty new (I got it in 2021) and it's a really good computer desk. However, it won't fit in my new bedroom (again, 9 feet by 9 feet is not the most spacious of areas), even if I install a Murphy bed. I may be absolutely crazy, but I could try installing an adult-appropriate loft bed (i.e. one that won't break my back and has some sort of shelf system that would serve as a night stand), but then that would definitely preclude having my parents overnight. With even a double Murphy bed I can give them my room for the night and sleep on a cot in the living room, but most loft beds are twin sized, and my 87 year old mother with a a bad hip certainly can't manage a ladder or steps even if did find one that was a size or two larger.

Argh. Logistics.

In a few years I would like to build a "Bunkie" on the property, which is basically a glorified shed, and I'd probably turn that either into guest quarters or into a home office for myself, but that's a pretty big purchase and certainly not one I can afford right now. So the problem of the desk remains. I may be able to wrap it securely in plastic and store it in the garage for that mythical future date when I can use it again, which is a decision unto itself. Am I just hoarding, or am I hanging onto an item with genuine future use? WHO KNOWS. The same desk costs about twice as much now as when I bought it thanks to inflation, and now that tariffs and trade wars are happening, that new price may double or even triple by the time I would buy another desk, and it might not be as good. Am I just dealing with a scarcity mindset or being fiscally prudent? GOOD QUESTION.

So, yes, welcome to Thinking About Packing With Phnee. It's like packing, only a lot less productive and lot more anxiety-ridden. :P

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

Current Mood: restless

I think I am paying for all of the "lack" of sleep from the past few weeks. Today was lost to feeling like absolute garbage most of the day. I have two more sleeps until I go to the sleep specialist on Monday morning and probably get told that I need a CPAP, and then the plan is to get ahold of a local CPAP provider as soon as humanly possible, because I am so tired of feeling tired. Right now would be the perfect time for a bit of extra energy, too, as I have to pack up the house.

I have been trying to get through the industrial quantity of borscht I made last Thursday, and it's officially down to a dull roar. I will have some left over for work next week, too, which is nice, as long as I don't spill it on my clothes. I have yet to find a reliable way to get beet juice stains out of clothing.

I have Quaker Meeting tomorrow, and after that I may work on de-cluttering my bedroom in anticipation of packing things. I am slowly trying to convince myself that I should part with my dining room set, which I've had for 16 years now and was my first "grown-up" purchase when I joined the RCMP. I love it so much, but there is nowhere to put it in the new house. There's no dining room to speak of, and the kitchen has a huge built-in island/table thing. I kind of want to just wrap all of it securely in plastic and store it in one of the outbuildings on the off chance that one day we'll have enough money to put an extension on the house, but that's probably super unrealistic.

Actually, since the garage will eventually have to be torn down, I am mentally toying with the idea of creating a secondary residence, like an in-law suite, with whatever building we end up putting there. I was thinking perhaps a quonset hut would be useful since they're not super expensive and can be adapted to any number of uses. I want to put in essentially a fully functioning guest house, with bedroom(s), bathroom, kitchenette, etc. But that's a huge and expensive project that is for a future me who hasn't just spent all her money buying a house. ;)

Man, I am doing a terrible job of convincing myself I don't need a dining room set. :P

I have so many plans, and so little free money with which to implement them. I do love building castles in Spain, though, it's one of my favourite hobbies, because it's completely free. Eventually I'd love to build a fully functional outdoor kitchen or maybe just a summer kitchen, one in which I can do large-scale processing of fruit and vegetables and meat. Having either a summer kitchen or an outdoor kitchen would make things a bit easier, because it's extremely hot work and it turns the house into an absolute oven, even with air conditioning.

Of course, I have some immediate expenses I have to figure out as well right after the move. We need fencing for the dogs, and the house needs gutters in order to not, oh, rot from the bottom up over time. I can afford one of those two things right away, but very likely not both, unless I can manage to get one done remarkably cheaply. *sigh* Being an adult is difficult.

Okay, once again, it is time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: calm

Another short entry, because I am still tired and all I want to do is go to bed. However, I am determined not to break my streak of posting every day, even if it's just a short and mostly symbolic post. It's not even the end of February, so it seems like it's way too early to give up on this particular goal, right?

Anyway, today wasn't much to write home about. KK and I attended the second part of the retirement course. The morning was all about maintaining your health after retirement, and it was the usual slightly gas-lighty, victim-blamey stuff you hear from people these days: most of your health is within your control if you engage in these specific behaviours! I'm not saying we should abdicate all responsibility for our health, but I swear to God, if ONE MORE PERSON suggests I try mindfulness, I will not be held responsible for my actions! Blah blah blah, exercise more and eat your vegetables, and 40% of cancer is preventable if you make good choices (that last one made my blood boil).

The afternoon was much better. Far less rage-inducing. We covered estate planning and what you need to write a will and some of the trickier legal things about financial and medical powers of attorney. Some of the stuff I already knew, but there was a lot I didn't know or realized I hadn't fully understood, so I was quite pleased with that. Sometime in the next couple of months I need to scrape together some money, hire an attorney, and have a proper will drawn up so that if I get hit by a bus, someone will be able to take care of my dogs. KK loves the dogs but she's physically not up to the task of caring for them, and has admitted as much, so another home will need to be found for them, one which can accommodate two high-energy hooligans. I wouldn't want them to be separated, especially for Pixie's sake: she's never known a life without her pack, and losing me, KK (whom she adores) and Rika and also Peggy would be scary and confusing and stressful for her. Peggy would also be stressed, but she at least has known life as an only dog, so she might be more resilient, but Pixie is a stage five clinger. With any luck, we will never need to find out.

Tomorrow I need to crisis clean all of downstairs because we're having guests on Saturday and I don't want to spend all of Saturday cleaning, especially since I need to cook dinner. It's funny because the professional organizer is coming at 15:00 and normally I'd want to leave all of the clutter and nonsense where it is so she can see the disaster she's getting herself into, but guests on Saturday absolutely trumps that. I might take some before and after pictures for her benefit. I'm fully expecting her to flee for the hills, but we shall see. The very good news is that she is perfecty happy to wear a mask while she's here, which is awesome. I appreciate people who are willing to do that these days, otherwise I wouldn't be working with her at all.

I have some semi-elaborate plans for dinner on Saturday. I am making green onion bread rolls as an entrée along with roast red pepper soup, then as a main course I have sesame chicken with curry rice and roasted asparagus planned, then a salad (Caesar salad because it's the only one KK will eat), and for dessert I plan to pick up something from a local patisserie, because the cooking alone is going to take quite a long time and dessert is not at all my forte. I hope it all turns out good!

On that note, it is time for bed. I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow.

Current Mood: hopeful

I forgot to report on the house KK and I went to see on Wednesday, mostly because it turned out to be totally not right for us.

( Read more... )

Anyway, as is my wont during night shifts, my brain is making a ton of plans. Or, more precisely, it's writing out a whole bunch of cheques that my body will not be able to cash later on, when it's time to actually execute those plans.

I learned this about myself many years ago, that when I'm a little sleep-deprived and the world is quiet and dark, I absolutely lose my mind and start planning all the ways in which I'm 100% going to turn my life around and become a completely different person--a better, more organized person, one who isn't constantly tired and has no energy, the kind of person who will voluntarily get up at 5am on a Saturday to go outside and get some exercise and then come home and spend several hours cleaning the house and cooking meals for the week and maybe do a little socializing with friends! I will become an unrecognizable, motivated version of myself who has all her shit together! This time will be different, because I have a Brand New System, I swear!

In practice, of course, this magical transformation never happens, because reality sets in pretty quickly once my night shifts are over. The sleep deprivation makes itself felt, and my usual brain fog/lack of energy takes over again. Tasks which I thought would take 15 minutes take three hours, and suddenly all my plans feel like A Lot of Work and I execute maybe 1% of them, if I'm lucky. I spend all of my down time doing the bare necessities to continue existing, and my projects never materialize.

So I have learned that it's fine to allow my brain to have wild fantasies about my future productivity, as long as the rest of me understands that this is all night shift-induced delirium and that I shouldn't actually expect to get most of it done. It's what my mother would call "Building castles in Spain." That way I can enjoy the fantasy and not feel like an abysmal failure when that fantasy doesn't become reality.

I lost most of today to a headache which was probably a migraine. Bleh. Not quite what I had planned, needless to say. I took the dogs to daycare and then napped for most of the afternoon, and even that combined with meds didn't completely get rid of it. I am kind of irked about it, but it is what it is. Tomorrow I have another 12 hour shift to look forward to, and then I'm off for the weekend and back for more shifts on Monday and Tuesday before I go back to a "normal" work routine for a while. Hopefully for a while, anyway.

The past couple of weeks have shown me that I am really no longer physically able to handle night shifts, and even just 12 hour day shifts are a little grueling. The night shifts have been *brutal*, though, and my body has responded with a very obvious "FUCK YOU" to my going back to that. My current position at work that mostly allows me to work 9-5, Monday to Friday, is a temporary one. At the very latest I'll be forced to go back on shift starting at the beginning of April (the new fiscal year), and that's going to be really rough.

I half-joked to KK that I should just quit and start a dog daycare, and she actually took me seriously, so now I am in full research mode. I actually considered this years ago (I even took lessons to become certified as a dog trainer back in the day, with the thought that I might have a boarding kennel as a side business if I ever got a hobby farm), and the idea never completely left me. It never occurred to me that KK would support my taking a massive risk like this, because becoming roommates was all about becoming financially more stable, but she actually really likes the idea and started making suggestions to boot!

So, as I said, I am in research mode. Technically right now I'm in brainstorming mode, just jotting down ideas about what various revenue streams could exist in a boarding kennel/dog daycare model, but starting tomorrow I am going to start going down researching rabbit holes. I don't know the first thing about how to conduct market research, which I will need if I'm to put together a decent business plan, which I also don't know the first thing about doing. I'm giving myself some pretty hard deadlines, since if I want to be serious about this I had better get on it. I'm giving myself two weeks or so to learn about making a business plan/proposal and to learn about market research (do I do it myself? Hire someone to do it? ACK.), so that I can then actually conduct said market research and put together the business plan by March. I want to put together something that's as air tight as possible and then figure out how to get a small business loan for the whole thing.

The one good thing is that right now is a good time for pet-related services, especially near a large city (even if Ottawa is on the smaller side, it's still a city of one million people). Lots of people got dogs during the past two years (pandemic puppies) and now that they're slowly going back to work, they're discovering that those dogs still need a lot of care and attention. I have a long rant about pandemic puppies that I will spare you, but enough people are willing to pay for care for their dogs during the day (myself included!) that I think this is a viable option. I don't have a ton of my own money to put in, which may be my main stumbling block, but I also still work full-time, which may buy me some wriggle room. I don't know, which is why more research is needed.

Anyway, I have lots of ideas, I just need to figure out how to make it happen. If I can get my shit together and obtain financing for it, I'd want to purchase a property for it in the early spring, then either build or retrofit the buildings I'd need over the summer and fall, equip all of it, and get underway right in time for the winter holiday season (even in the midst of a pandemic, the holidays are always a busy time of year for pet services). This is all assuming best-case scenarios, but honestly this is the first time in at least four years that I've genuinely felt excited about something work-related, so fingers crossed that something will come of it!

Current Mood: excited
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1283234.html

I don't know if I will have the stamina to write out all the plans I'm having existential angst about. I got up at 5:30 this morning without batting an eye when my alarm went off, despite my having gone to bed ridiculously late. I took Peggy for a walk around the neighbourhood, and we met several dog friends and saw a bunny! The bunny held very still for several minutes, and then when it took off Peggy lost her shit and screamed her silly head off. Luckily it didn't last for too long (it was 7:00 and I am quite sure none of the nice people who live in the area wanted to listen to my dog howling bloody murder at the local leporids.

I had a decently productive day at work, too. I had a couple of instances of slacking off, but one was very short-lived, and in the other I ended up playing a game on my phone while listening in on a very long meeting at work in which I didn't have much to say but needed to be at just for situational awareness. I had planned a few things that I didn't get to because two of my employees reported pay issues first thing when I got in, so I spent a fair bit of time trying to get to the bottom of both those situations. Both of them are still unresolved, but I think we can get one fixed pretty easily, and for the other the employee asked me to hold off until Wednesday, when he will get his new pay and pay stub and see if the error has already been rectified (fingers crossed that it has been!).

I spent a decent chunk of the afternoon working on a new PowerPoint presentation for the information session I need to give to prospective candidates for the job. There is a presentation that already exists, but the information on the slides is woefully out of date, and it is quite honestly one of the ugliest set of slides I've had the misfortune of seeing. It's an embarrassment, and so I am re-doing it, even though my PowerPoint skills are pretty rudimentary. I managed four slides, and they look decent to my eye. I may try and find some friends to look it over (it's a presentation for external candidates, so there's no classified information) just to confirm that I'm not overestimating my abilities.

By the time I got to the grocery store to pick up my order I had run out of energy, to the point where the nice boy who brought out my groceries asked me if I wanted to keep the bags that came with my groceries and I blanked so hard. Decision fatigue is the real deal, folks! Anyway, we figured it out (he was very understanding about my not being able to make a decision about plastic bags) and I brought all the groceries back. I actually forgot about them when I got home, but luckily remembered a few minutes after and managed to bring them all in and put them away.

Long story short: stick a fork in me, I am done. I might try a bullet point list of the things that have been trotting around in my head, kind of like a way to download them all and be able to refer back (supposing I ever refer back to this post--I am notoriously not good at doing that sort of thing). Inch'Allah I will get back to it eventually.

Training Peggy: I'd like to do a lot more work with Peggy on her training this summer. This includes basic obedience training as well as hunting, but if she does well with the obedience I'd like to get her doing a bit of agility as well. I think she'd really enjoy it and it would be a good way for her to burn off energy.
Veggie garden: because of the lockdown I haven't been able to go with the original plan of taking advantage of the new-to-me friend's offer of using a parcel of her unused farmland to grow veggies. It's also looking like KK and I will be living here for at least another year, so I am looking at growing at least a few fruits and vegetables in the house and maybe a couple in the garden even though there's not much room there. I'm thinking of trying to convert the basement with grow lights and heat pads and mini greenhouse covers and see what I can get going in terms of food grown at home.
More garden stuff! This is probably insane, but I want to try a small aquaponics setup, probably in the basement again. Cost and the ability to set it all up will be the determining factor, but OTOH I could grow my own tilapia! How cool would that be?
Clear out the garage: this one is definitely going to happen one way or another because it's the only way KK and I will both be able to have our cars parked at the house. I am considering the state of my finances and trying to determine if it's worth it to bring back the professional organizers for a single day, because I figure that's about as long as it would take to get it cleared out with the help of one or two determined professionals. It is still likely to be quite expensive, though not nearly as expensive as it was to get the upstairs cleared out (small mercies), but probably worth it in terms of actually getting it done and not having to deal with getting rid of the donations, at least (the professionals do that for you, which is great!).
Kitting out the garage with proper storage for tools and such.
Proper meal planning and cooking from scratch.
Working my way back up to being able to run ~5km and doing that regularly with Peggy.

I feel like there was more, but I can't remember any of it now. Oh well. Maybe it'll come back to me later. It's now nearly 9:00 pm and I am faaaaading. Time for bed.

Current Mood: sleepy
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1267369.html

Peggy and I had a very good day with her Uncle Dylan and Auntie Sarah. I got up later than I had planned (the theme for the week continues), but managed to get there by about 11:00, so it wasn't too late, all things considered. Visiting the little farm is always a pleasure. I took Peggy's check cord with me (it's basically just a long, soft rope that clips to her collar and that then loops loosely around her waist) and we did a little work on impulse control around the chickens and everything else. The way the check cord works is that if she pulls too hard, it tightens around her waist in a way that's not comfy, and it loosens the minute she stops pulling. We're seeing some good results already, which is very nice.

Peggy of course did her due diligence of climbing her Uncle Dylan like a tree, and played hard with Shadow as well. Shadow was pretty well-behaved all day, and at the end of the day he was surprisingly pooped out! Normally Peggy crashes hard while he is still raring to go, which can create a fair bit of dog drama, but today both dogs conked out at about the same time, which made for a very relaxing evening.

I helped with the construction of the gazebo they are repurposing into a chicken coop to house a whole bunch of feeder chickens this summer, and we went out to the riverbank to collect fiddleheads, which was a first for me. I have very unfond memories of being served fiddleheads at school lunches when I was young, and they were always really bitter-tasting mush, so I had decided at the time that I didn't like them. Since I am now pretty sure they are not meant to be boiled to within an inch of their lives, I have taken a bunch of fresh fiddleheads home with me and plan to try them again and see if it's actually true that I don't like them, or if I can successfully declare that I have changed my mind.

Also, I got to drive the tractor! It felt very tippy to me (it's not actually that tippy), and even though intellectually I knew I was on pretty level ground my lizard brain spent the entire time basically yelling "SCREEEEEEEEE IT'S GOING TO TIP OVER AND CRUSH YOU AND YOU WILL HAVE RUINED YOUR FRIENDS' TRACTOR JUST AS THE MAIN GROWING SEASON IS STARTING OMG SCREEEEEEEEEE!" My lizard brain is very dramatic.

I did get the hang of it relatively quickly, at least, and I helped load a bunch of rocks into the bucket and ferried them to another spot. It was pretty exciting!

Have some photos of Peggy, Shadow, and her Uncle Dylan having fun behind the cut. :)

( Doggos! )

I don't know if it's just the endorphins of having such a fun day, but on the way home my brain was bubbling over with ideas and plans for the coming summer months. I know that my brain REALLY likes making plans (so much dopamine!) and then I rarely follow through on them, but I'd really like to make a go of at least some of them this year. It's past midnight now, unfortunately (the problem with visiting friends who are over an hour away is that it makes for late nights), so I am going to call it a night rather than wax eloquent about all the castles I'm going to build in Spain.

The goals for tomorrow are pretty straightforward. I am going to KK's to help out with de-cluttering, which is my main commitment. I also have Quaker Meeting from 10:30 to 11:30. I need to do laundry and get a few groceries (I should really get into the habit of ordering online for pickup, but I am terrible at remembering to do it in time and then the pick-up availabilities are too far in the future), and ideally I would like to get up early to take Peggy for a run so that she's not spending the whole time in her crate being bored while I'm at KK's. Oh, wait, I just remembered I have a Skype date with my parents tomorrow (we usually Skype on Mondays and Thursdays, but we got thrown off schedule this week), so that's two commitments I have. I also need to start putting those in my calendar so I don't forget. So many things, so little working memory. ;)

Okay. Bed. If I have time tomorrow after my Skype call with my parents I will post an entry about all the exciting dopamine-induced plans I've been thinking of. Sometimes getting it in writing gives me a better idea of whether something is actually feasible or if it's just me getting high off my own alternate reality thinking.

Current Mood: chipper
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1266919.html

I don't have a specific topic for this entry, just general catching up and making plans —most of which will never come to fruition, knowing me, but it's nice to dream. It's what my mother calls "building castles in Spain." I seem to recall that has a historical origin somewhere... hang on, I'm going to go look it up. Okay, I'm back (not that you can tell in textual form that I was gone), and the internet was mostly unhelpful, but it seems to stem from Charlemagne's abortive attempt at conquering Spain. So, there you go.

( Feel-good therapy )

( Projects and stuff )

Oh, and before I forget, I saw Ghostbusters last weekend with

toughlovemuse and

owldaughter, and it was amaaaaaaaaazeballs! I can't emphasize how much I enjoyed that movie. It did have some problems, but overall it was fun and engaging, and the women were all fantastic, and there was not one single fat joke in the whole movie! I was sort of bracing for impact on the latter, because of Melissa McCarthy. She's a fat woman in Hollywood, and the price of admission for that is to constantly have to make jokes at your own expense about your weight. I understand that that's how it works, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy fat jokes. There were none, not even jokes about food apart from a running gag about wonton soup having a bad soup-to-wonton ratio. It was glorious. I have also joined the legions of fans who are super in love with Jillian Holtzmann. She has the most bad-ass fight sequence in the movie:

I mean, HOT DAMN.

She's weirdly not my favourite character, but she's definitely the character I'd want to hang out with/possibly take on a date. She's arguably the most brilliant/mad scientist of all the women, and she is entirely glorious.

If you haven't seen this movie, you should definitely go watch it (unless you are not into this sort of movie at all, in which case you probably won't like it).

Current Mood: good

Clearly, it's not working for me. I used to post to LJ a million times a day, but that was before Twitter gave me an outlet for all those random thoughts that pop into my head that I feel compelled to share with the world. ;)

So nowadays I wait until I feel I have something of substance to say in order to post here, but let's face it, I rarely have anything of substance to say these days. It's all fleeting thoughts and superficial impressions, all the time!

( Volunteering and Google Alert Weirdness! )

( Rambling about routines and health and sleep and stuff )

I think later this week I'll make a more upbeat post with all the new projects I want to do in my copious amounts of spare time. Those are a lot more fun than all this whining about being tired and out of shape and not having enough time or energy to do things. So, an upbeat post to look forward to!

This has been a rambly, long-winded post. Thank you for bearing with me as I basically process everything in my head out loud. ;)

Current Mood: determined

I'm in a random sort of mood tonight, so while I'm procrastinating on doing my quality control at work (I loathe this one aspect of my job--it's incredibly tedious and feels suspiciously like busy-work) I've been thinking about pets.

Those of you who've known me long enough will not be surprised when I say I really like having pets. I had a dog when I was little (from when I was born until the day I turned 13--literally, my dog passed on my birthday), as well as hamsters and birds when I was a teenager. The same day I moved out of my parents' home I went to the SPCA and adopted two cats, and have never had fewer than three cats at any given time since 2003. The first thing I did when I got a house was adopt a dog.

In my ideal world, I'd have a house crammed full of pets of all shapes and sizes. If I could get away with it, I'd have the house full of cats, and at least two dogs, if not more.

I harbour a not-so-secret dream of having one of those really beautiful aquariums filled with fish. Maybe not a salt water aquarium because those are hellishly difficult to maintain, but a freshwater one would do just as nicely. I have a Pinterest board devoted to aquariums, because I love fish and it gives me great pleasure

Just before I found out that my apartment building was being sold and I decided to buy a house, I had everything in place to get myself some pet ferrets, right down to buying a cage and a few accessories after doing tons of research on whether ferrets would be a good addition to my household of multiple cats (I didn't have Sergent yet), and whether my work schedule would be suitable for all their needs, since ferrets are intelligent and very social and need a fair bit of stimulation.

In my family my mother was the bird lover, and we had canaries and finches for years. The canaries didn't live very long, poor things. The two we had each succumbed to respiratory infections (the second one got sick while it was boarding at a veterinary clinic when we went on holiday), but the finches lived with us for over a decade and the vet was amazed at how old they were when we told her. Even though the birds were my mother's love, I miss being in a house filled with bird song. Also, I have had a long fascination with all the various birds in the parrot family. My godmother used to keep budgerigars (I also had one when I was eleven) and taught them to speak and sing and whistle, and I've always known them to be active, affectionate little birds. I've wanted a parrot since I was eight years old, though we never got one, mostly for financial reasons, I think. I also never got a parrot in spite of how much I wanted one, because they are incredibly expensive, and since my job kept me away for entire days it wasn't a good idea. Parrots are extraordinarily intelligent and suffer from boredom and anxiety if they're not given enough stimulation. So my job kind of ruled that out.

There are any number of other more "exotic" pets that are on my list of "would totally have," as well. Rabbits, rats, hamsters, hedgehogs (I think they're legal in Canada, but I haven't really checked). I'm not as fond of our cold-blooded friends, so I don't think I'd ever choose to keep reptiles or amphibians, but

pdaughter brought her turtle Karma to live with us, and I'm rather fond of her. She's a very sociable turtle, as far as a turtle that lives in a tank can be sociable. She tends to try to swim through the glass to be with the people in the room, which is fun. So, yes, she might be changing my mind about cold-blooded creatures in general.

It's always been a bit of a struggle for me not to respond to every post I see about a cat or a dog needing a new home. I hate the idea of any animal being unwanted/without a forever home. I'm getting better at not feeling horrible every time I see one of those posts, but it's hard. ;)

This is all stuff I fantasize about at the same time as my "if I win the lottery" fantasy. My job and current commute make it absolutely impossible to consider getting any more pets than we currently have, not to mention that, y'know, pets are now a joint decision rather than a solo one.

Not to mention, pets are a huge responsibility. Right now I'm facing a metric assload of vet bills in my not-so-distant future (tests for Sergent, medication, and all the seasonal shots for him and the cats), and that's the price one pays for having animals in one's care. You can't just have the pets for company but then not give them the care they need. It's part of the having-a-pet contract. They supply you with infinite, unconditional love, and you ensure their quality of life and love them back. That means that you can't have pets that are outside your budget. The more "exotic" your pet, the more money you're going to need to throw into the mix, both for their basic care and for veterinary costs.

Pets are a joy, but they're not toys and they're not belongings that you can simply put to the curb when they malfunction and you can't afford to get them repaired. You are responsible for making sure they're taken care of for all of their lives (which is why I was heartbroken when I had to re-home Smudge. It was the best decision for everyone, and he's very happy now, but it was a heart-wrenching decision and I still feel like I failed him). If your animal is suffering, that's on you, and it's up to you to make sure that they don't suffer needlessly. That will often mean vet bills. Now, I'm more than familiar with being faced with unexpected and extraordinarily steep vet bills, and sometimes having to make the hard choice of "we can't afford that now." It sucks. It sucks a lot. But it's one of the reasons I didn't take in more pets years ago, because I knew that if more than one animal got sick, I wouldn't be able to cover all those costs, and I wasn't willing to take that chance.

So the long and the short of it is, that I have a little mental house (like a cottage version of a mind palace) in which I keep dozens of pets. A complete menagerie. I do very much enjoy visiting my mind cottage, and maybe in a few years, when things have settled and I'm no longer splitting my time between two cities, a version of that cottage will become reality. :)

Current Mood: content

Turns out that poking around Amazon at 03:00 is a dangerous thing. I've created two new wish lists, and keep refreshing the "recommendations" page.

I'll just note for the record that I use my amazon.ca wish lists as a kind of log for myself of the books I should look out for and eventually pick up, and not for anything else, really. Most of the time I prefer to pick up a book physically before I buy it, especially if it's one with which I'm not familiar. I like to leaf through it, and check it over to see if it really is what I'm looking for.

I've managed, just tonight, to create about three or four new wish lists. Some of it is for research on novels that I will likely never write.

*sigh*

I guess it helps pass the time.

Current Mood: quixotic

What I really want is a one-month vacation.

One week to sleep. Two weeks to go off gallivanting to exciting places, or possibly do exciting home-renovation projects. One week to settle back in, cook, clean, do laundry, and get back into a go-to-work mindspace.

Mostly I want the week of sleep, but in order to have it I need the other three weeks to get everything else done and still be rested enough to go back to work refreshed and not feeling like death warmed over.

I'm moving in seventeen days, on the 30th. I'm on "vacation" as of the morning of the 25th. I'll likely be spending at least part of that day asleep. That gives me four days to finish packing/cleaning, one afternoon to move (the 30th, once

ai731 and t! are moved out), and six days to unpack/move in/clean up and re-do the upstairs floor. Then I go back to work.

I'm not sure if I've whined enough about this yet. I can't wait to see what I'll sound like after I've finished my nine consecutive nights (96 hours in total) of night shift. None of which is considered overtime, I might add, which is irksome in the extreme. Doubtless I shall whine even more. I've developed a talent for it.

Current Mood: tired

Elizabeth Peters is an evil, evil woman. The more I read, the more I want. I got my hands on a copy of "The Falcon At the Portal" and it just about broke my heart in twelve separate pieces. Wah! Nefret! Wah! Ramses! Waaaaaaah!

:::gets stabbed repeatedly in heart by cruel, merciless author:::

I can't begin to imagine how hard it must have been for her to do that to her characters.

owldaughter is entirely to blame for my current heartbreak: she introduced me to the series.

In other news, work is work. I have so many things going on these days that I have no time at all to post about them, and more stuff is piling itself on top of that, and yet I still have to wedge sleep in there somewhere. Sleep-deprived!Phnee is not a fun Phnee, let me tell you.

Let's make a grocery list of stuff that's taking place in Phnee's existence these days:

( This got long... )

Anyway, that's what I'm up to these days (and in the near future). I had a lovely chat on the phone with

joane and

shenlo later on. I looked up their number on canada411.com, since for some reason I didn't have it. I'm not much of a phone person as a rule, but I thought it was high time we have a voice-to-voice conversation as opposed to just an online chat. Not that those aren't a great way of communicating, but sometimes it's nice to hear people's voices on the other end of the line. Also, I got to squee in person about Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, which is all to the good. :)

Now I'm going to bed. Might post a poll about the aforementioned filter first, but then definitely bed. :)

Current Mood: bleh, it's still hot

The office is playing the lottery again.

There's something about the possibility of huge sums of money like that that makes one drift into odd but mostly pleasant daydreams. I'm very fond of building castles in Spain. This should come as a surprise to no one. I inherited the habit from my mother: always think of the future, but never in "realistic" terms. Realism is highly overrated. Realism says I can't play the drums. Realism says I can't write a novel in three days if I want to. Realism says "You can't be a band if you have no instruments."

I figure there can't be too many people in our society who haven't at one point or another worked out in their heads what they would do if they won the lottery. Regardless of whether they play the lottery, for that matter. I know I have. Whenever there's a large jackpot, I find myself wondering about it. Sometimes I even buy a ticket. Mostly I don't, because I know that the odds of my winning are about the same as being struck by lightning in a submarine.

One day, though, I'd like to jump up and down and shout: "My submarine was hit by lightning!"

The funny thing is, I don't think that winning the smallest jackpot available would allow me to never work again. I worked it out. Say I won $1,000,000. That's a large amount of money, right? I mean, the mind boggles at that kind of number: you can't really conceive of it in physical terms. Still, it means that I would be able to live on an average income of $30,000 a year for about 33 years. It's more money than I currently make, and I wouldn't be working for it, which is always a good thing. It also means that I wouldn't have any money left at the age of 60 unless I found some really funky way of investing my money which made it do all sorts of interesting things. Given that my life expectancy is about 30 years more than that (and that's a conservative estimate), that's not great. I don't want to start working at 60, after all.

Like I said, castles in Spain. I'm probably never going to win the lottery. The odds are very much against me. I'm very likely going to have to scramble after money for the rest of my life, given my skills and the current job market, which doesn't look like it's going to improve any time soon. I just find it fun to worry about all the "problems" I'd have if I actually won. It would just kind of be insulting to win a large jackpot only to realise that you still have to go back to work. I'd like work to be a choice and not a necessity, something that brings me a sense of fulfilment and even pleasure. I want to be able to say "I can't believe I get paid to do this!" How many people get to say that on a regular basis?

If I win the lottery, I want the result to be that I never have to worry about working again.

Current Mood: daydreaming

I like this new idea of composing my LJ posts at work and then sending them to myself. Mind you, I may not be able to do this in two weeks' time, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. In the meantime, all you lucky folk in LJ land get Phnee!Spam. Don't you feel special now?

Anyhow, this post is nothing terribly special. I'm simply trying to put down some of my priorities for the near future, because, well, I'm tired of my life always being in the toilet due to one thing or another. So this is just some noodling on my part in order to get my life straightened out.

This got long, be warned.

( Sealed to protect my faithful readers from complete and abject boredom )

Okay, well, that's it for that. Obviously there are lots of activities and things that are going to get affected by any and all decisions I make regarding work and finances and whatever, but I'll cross those bridges when I get to them.

At this point, something's gotta give, and since it can't be me, well, then I have to make sure something else gives.

Current Mood: determined

In all senses of the term.

The office pitched in together to buy lottery tickets. It would be very nice if we won. Heck, I wouldn't even turn up my nose at a few hundred dollars. Heck, even fifty extra dollars would be nice. Extra money, no matter what the amount, is always nice.

So, the way it always happens when I buy a lottery ticket, I've started building my castles in spain. You know, that happy little fantasy world in which I actually have the money to do the stuff I'd like to do with my life: buy my parents a house in France, get my own place, pay off all my bills, what have you.

I could go on at length, but I won't.

What I'd really like now is a vacation. Somewhere that involves a sunny beach and turquoise water and not too many tourists.

After that, I'd opt for the kind of vacation with a large amount of forest and/or river, and lots of trekking and camping and hiking. I want to be outside, dammit, and not stuck inside this stupid little cubicle, no matter how "open concept" this damned office is meant to be.

I have spoken. :P

Current Mood: discontent

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I am so much better at planning than executing
*flops*
An early post today
Overslept again
I was tempted to skip today, but here I am
Night Shift Delusions
The best-laid plans...
Plans? Maybe?
Just A Really Nice Day
Varia
I should stop waiting to have something to say in order to post...
Animals, specifically pets.
In other news
Sleeeeeep...
Posty spam!
"But not a real green dress —that's cruel."
More spam —the dangers of writing LJ posts at work
I could really use a break now

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Entries tagged with castles in spain

I am so much better at planning than executing

flops

An early post today

Overslept again

I was tempted to skip today, but here I am

Night Shift Delusions

The best-laid plans...

Plans? Maybe?

Just A Really Nice Day

Varia

I should stop waiting to have something to say in order to post...

Animals, specifically pets.

In other news

Sleeeeeep...

Posty spam!

"But not a real green dress —that's cruel."

More spam —the dangers of writing LJ posts at work

I could really use a break now