Corner of Bourbon & Division

Now that I've committed to staying on with my landlords, people are messaging me about potential new rooms. Of course. Luckily they all sound about as "promising" as the other shitholes I visited last week. So I'm not too torn up about it.

( In which Phnee whines about being isolated at work, and also tired. )

( The ongoing hair experiment. )

( Cooking! And mason jar salads! )

( And coffee. )

I failed at getting up early today. Every so often on a commute day I'm able to get up by noon, but today that didn't happen. I wish I knew the secret of those people who manage to function really well on four hours of sleep a day. It feels like it would solve at least a few of my problems. At the very least I'd be able to drive home directly after work instead of having to come back here to sleep. Every time I drive home right after work I'm forced to stop halfway there at an On Route to nap in the car lest I cause an accident.

All that's left for me now is to pack up my stuff and make a detour to buy milk. I still have to wash and put away the dishes, too. Even if I weren't leaving, I found out the hard way that leaving dishes in the drying rack is a capital offence as far as my landlady is concerned. I left a plate, a pot and some cutlery to dry overnight, and got a very passive-aggressive "Oh, you're just leaving all your dishes there, I see," from her. This despite the fact that I was going to be the first person up the next morning, when I always put away dry dishes. I keep this kitchen cleaner than the one at home, but it seems that's not enough. Yet another reason to find a new place to stay, I think. This "You pay rent but I don't want to ever know you're here and also keep your stuff out of the common areas except when I want to use it" attitude is getting wearying to deal with.

In the meantime, I have decided that I don't want to be a negative presence on LiveJournal. No one wants to hear my complaining. So I'm going to try very hard to give up complaining in general. Here and on Twitter and IRL. If you never hear from me again, you'll know it's because I had nothing else to say. ;) But seriously, I have become an awful person lately and I don't like it. So, new leaf. No more complaining, ever. It won't be easy, because I do seem to enjoy complaining an awful lot and often I don't even realise I'm doing it. So if you catch me at it, you have my permission to verbally smack me upside the head and tell me not to be such a Debbie Downer.

I'm serious. They've been preparing for a winter that hasn't arrived in well over five books. If they were in Canada, they'd be all set. Plus, we have snowblowers. They'd be amazed.

I, however, fan of winter though I am, am 2000% done. There's a winter storm warning for Cornwall, Lancaster, and western Quebec for later today. Guess what day it is for me? If you guessed COMMUTE DAY, you win a prize! It's a crappy prize comprised mostly of slush, black ice and utter frustration, but whatever.

No matter which way I look at it, today is going to suck. If I stay here in Ottawa and sleep until early afternoon, I'll have to drive home through the worst of it. If I leave now(ish), right after packing up and having a quick breakfast, I'm going to hit rush hour traffic in Ottawa and add on about an hour to my two-hour drive, while going on no sleep. Which is the better option? Who the fuck knows?

I'm opting for driving without snow, but it means rush hour traffic and sleep deprivation. I mean, more sleep deprivation than usual. If I get home early enough, I'll try to take a nap before Bean gets home from daycare. In theory, that should be doable. I can't imagine that driving conditions will be so bad that it'll take me eight or more hours to drive home. (Famous last words. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything)

Compounding all this is the fact that I had a rather shitty time of it at work last night. Maybe Mercury is retrograde again, maybe the moon was full, I don't know, but all my systems shat themselves and died. They took turns to do it, very politely, too, so that I ended up spending the entire night on the phone with multiple help desks trying to sort things out. Also one of the alarms went off at work: a really loud, really shrill alarm that's right outside my door and that can't be turned off. And because it wasn't deemed a "priority" alarm, I was informed that it would wait until regular hours started this morning. So I got a good seven hours of that to add to everything else that was going on. All the help desk people asked me what the sound was.

"That's not your fire alarm, is it?"

"No, no, it's fine."

"What did you say?"

"I said it's fine! Can we go back to fixing the network connection please?"

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you very well."

Etc.

Anyway, I am having breakfast. There will be more coffee in a minute. Because I'm leaving early, it means I can't pick up milk the way I'd intended (milk in Ontario is much cheaper than in Quebec, so I try to stock up on my way home usually). So thank you, weather, for fucking things up for me even more. After coffee I'll finish packing and be on my way. I have to get gas for the car (yet another delay), and I may try to aim for a Tim Horton's as well mid-trip, in an effort not to fall asleep at the wheel, which would be so many levels of disastrous I don't know where to start.

Wish me luck!

Or, in which my dreams are a lot more literal than I'd like, and yet still more awesome than my current life. I think this one was triggered by my alarm clock, but I can't be sure. Either way, in my dream I woke up to the strains of "A Well-Respected Man" by The Kinks and started getting ready to go to work. Only in my dream I was actually Susan Ivanova (see icon), or at least her equivalent in whatever my new dream-universe was. My duties weren't exactly clear, nor did it seem to matter, as most of the dream involved being very annoyed at having to get up so damned early. Ivanova, as I recall, was not a morning person in Babylon 5, either. :) I was kind of disappointed when I woke up and realised that if I wanted to listen to The Kinks then I'd have to fiddle with my playlists on my iPhone myself, rather than have a spontaneous soundtrack to my life. I was still pretty displeased at having to get up at 3:50, so that part of the dream was nicely literal. Also, I am not Claudia Christian, which is a perpetual source of disappointment.

( More dreams, cut for length )