Corner of Bourbon & Division

I have just enough energy to do an 8 hour shift at work, and not much else. I'm still pretty congested, and although I didn't bother testing today I'm quite sure it would come back positive if I did. I also sound like something crawled into my throat and died. I've had a few clients tell me so over the phone. Oops? I assured them the Government of Ontario has declared me perfectly healthy, and yet somehow they were still skeptical.

The oil splash over my right hand yesterday has turned into two very impressive looking blisters on my ring finger and knuckle. They're still a little painful, but nothing terrible. It mostly looks like I've developed a highly localized case of bubonic plague, although maybe not quite so dire. I wish there was a lesson to be learned from this about kitchen safety, but it was honestly a freak thing, and I was merely the victim of the laws of physics.

I got an amusing call from someone from Ministry & Counsel on my way to work, asking me to help him troubleshoot issues with his new laser printer of all things. Now, faithful readers will likely recall that I am not exactly a computer wizard, and indeed my coworkers have joked for years that I have a "computer curse," wherein computers will randomly malfunction around me in ways that don't make sense. Anyway, I explained that I was driving to work and generally not a computer person, and then I suggested Googling the problem because that's my go-to when first trying to troubleshoot computer issues. Now, this guy used to be a really savvy computer person, but he hasn't kept up with all the latest advances, so it wasn't like I was talking to a babe in arms. He thanked me and told me he'd try it before hitting up one of his techy friends. I am still baffled but also slightly honoured at the thought that I project enough competence that people now randomly call me to help with completely unrelated stuff! XD

In house news, I'm going to need to find some extra energy somewhere in order to start packing up the house properly. I've hired someone to come help pack in two weeks' time, the week before the move, but it's only for three days, and that won't be enough to get it all done. It should be a huge help, at least, to have one other able-bodied person there. In the meantime, I need to pack up as much of the rest of the house as I can.

I feel like the most boring person ever, because I have very little of substance to post about lately. Hopefully I will have something more interesting soon. Thanks for bearing with me, friends, and I will catch you on the flip side!

 I may have overdone it a little today, but in my defense it was (sort of) necessary. See, a couple of weeks ago I got a slightly nasty email from my community garden organiser, telling me I had to clear my stuff out of my old plot so they could till it. I was at the time dealing with my parents' medical emergency, and I knew that afterward I'd be working night shifts, so I told the organiser that I would be there on the morning of April 29th to deal with it, and to please not till my plot because I had a currant bush and a whole bunch of asparagus crowns that I planted there last year (which cost me a pretty penny, let me tell you!) that I wanted to rescue first.

Then of course I got Covid, and it was arguably at its peak on April 29th, so there was no way in hell I was going to be able to get to the community garden while I was running a fever and coughing my brains out and generally being horribly ill. Luckily for me, Dylan and Sarah were absolute heroes and rockstars and agreed to come help me today, a mere five days after I said I'd clear out the plot (my deadline was May 5th, so it's not as bad as it sounds). We first met up at the dog park and they brought their dogs, Frankie and Shadow, to play with Peggy and Pixie, and a good time was had by all.

Dylan and Sarah did most of the work in my plot, because I am about as useful as a wet paper towel these days, and Sarah kept telling me to sit down because I couldn't breathe. It was a humbling experience, not going to lie. We rescued the currant bush and the asparagus, cleared out the paving stones that were my abortive attempt at an herb spiral last year, all the cardboard I put down, a few bags of soil, and my 500 litre water barrel. The rest was all straw mulch and dirt, which we left in place. 

We were also visited by a pair of mallards (a drake and a hen) who were not in the least put out by our presence, which was really sweet. They just swam by in a storm drain, doing duck things, totally unbothered.

I gave Dylan and Sarah a dozen quail eggs as a token thank you gesture, and offered to let them keep all the bags of soil, since I'm not going to be using it immediately anyway. I am going to have to figure out how to get soil delivered to the new property, since I definitely can't haul it in the Yaris and even KK's Nissan Rogue wouldn't be up to the task. It's a job for a pickup truck, to be sure. Maybe I can either rent a truck or arrange for delivery. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

I also helped KK carry the air conditioning unit up from the basement. The weather is getting much warmer, and if we want a snowball's chance in hell of not dying of heat prostration while we're trying to pack, then the A/C needs to go in the window in the living room.

So between the dog park, the community garden, and hauling the A/C unit up the stairs, I may have overdone it slightly. All of these things were necessary, because A) the dogs were climbing the walls out of boredom and frustration, B) the community garden was threatening to till my beloved asparagus, and C) the A/C is going to be needed in the coming weeks. But hoo boy, am I very sore and very tired. Hopefully I will sleep reasonably well as a result tonight.

Speaking of sleeping well, I am on Day 20 of using the CPAP, and now that I know that it was Covid causing my throat to be super sore and dry, I can say with confidence that I have no trouble using it at all. I'm a little frustrated about the Covid because it's completely skewing any impressions I might have had about my energy levels and brain fog. I can't tell if I'm improving because I've been as sick as the proverbial dog. ARGH.

Anyway, time will tell. At least I'm not struggling with the CPAP. I switched to the largest size of mask/nose pillow, as the two smaller sizes were causing sores to develop on either side of my nose (super attractive), and that has been working well for me so far. It doesn't keep me from sleeping, and even though I wake up during the night it's not noticeably more than before, and it's mostly just to reposition the hose when I turn over and it does something weird. So, so far so good.

Okay. Time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Another very short post tonight. I am improving steadily, which is nice. Mostly I have some lingering congestion and a whole lot of fatigue. KK and I spent the day watching bad TV and bad movies, even by my standards. KK has some honestly appalling taste in television, so I retreated to listening to stuff on my phone while she watched Judge Judy, and then she inflicted National Treasure on me, which I managed to avoid for the past 20 years and which finally caught up with me today. KK keeps inflicting terrible Nicholas Cage movies on me for some reason (last year it was Face/Off).

The rest of the time I spent watching the law commentary YouTube channel Runkle of the Bailey (which I love for the name), who is covering a real life trial which I got weirdly invested in last summer. I am not normally a True Crime Girlie, but this whole case has been so wild that it has caught my attention and I am really hoping to see a not guilty verdict, because if there's anything I hate, it's police incompetence, misconduct, and corruption, and this case is rife with it. (It's the Karen Read trial in Massachussetts, if you're wondering.) Honestly, this whole thing is so far outside my normal sphere of interest that I barely recognize myself, and yet here I am. *shrugs* I got nothing.

Tomorrow I have Ministry & Counsel, and I am hoping to be able to get through that time without completely losing my voice.

On that note, it's time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I have absolutely nothing new to say because I've been asleep or playing solitaire on my phone all day while listening to YouTube videos like a podcast. 

Covid sucks. Every part of my body hurts and I've been running a slight fever on and off for three days now. Today my ears decided to start hurting, to add to the party. 

KK also started getting symptoms late last night, so we're in for a real fun two weeks or so. I can only hope that I recover in a couple of days, because the last time she had Covid it flattened her for weeks, and we absolutely cannot afford both of us being out of commission.

Fucking hell.

WEAR YOUR MASKS, FRIENDS.

(My father is very chastened and has promised to stop wearing his mask over his chin.)

Catch you on the flip side, everyone!

Unsurprisingly, my mother has come down with the same symptoms as my father. She's taking her meds and being a good patient and resting a lot and drinking a lot of fluids, and so far seems to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I spoke to both my parents yesterday evening, and they're both being pretty good about things. My father is always more motivated when my mother's well-being is very obviously on the line. I wish he were able to project that into being more careful the rest of the time, but that's probably too much to hope for. Neither one of them is particularly good at risk assessment or management, alas.

I've been harbouring a headache and a slightly sore throat since yesterday, and I cannot for the life of me tell if it's Covid or if it's just the stress of the week catching up to me combined with the truly terrible air quality at work or the cumulative effect of using the CPAP without the humidifier (because it was way too warm). Am I paranoid? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face. KK is going to be picking up fresh Covid tests tomorrow if we can find some, since ours are expired and therefore unreliable. It's been increasingly difficult to find Covid tests in Ottawa in the past couple of years--no one seems to carry them anymore. Shopper's Drug Mart apparently sells individual tests for $7.00 each, which is an absolute rip-off, but I expect nothing less from the Galen Weston Jr. empire. The main reason I don't know if it's Covid is because these symptoms do not at all match my parents' symptoms,  which are mainly extreme fatigue and some gastrointestinal stuff. So headache and slightly sore throat? Who knows?

Work is going by very slowly, partly because of the aforementioned headache. I'm glad it's not busier, though, because I've already made a pretty regrettable mistake this evening which my shift partner caught, luckily enough, and it's been a pain in the ass to fix. I hate making mistakes at work, even though objectively I know that they are unavoidable. It triggers my impostor syndrome like nobody's business. Oops, make that two mistakes. My coworker is saving my bacon tonight. The second mistake was when I was trying to fix the first mistake, and I didn't realize that there was a new SOP for fixing the mistake and I followed an old SOP for fixing the mistake. *lies on the floor*

I am really looking forward to my bed, which I will be in in about four hours if everything goes really well. I got relatively little sleep today, because we got home from KK's endoscopy shortly before noon, and then I had to wake up in order to be on time for my phone call with Brian, my birth father. He actually sent me a text message saying he'd caught a cold and could we postpone to tomorrow? To which I thought "Sweet, I can go back to sleep!" so I agreed, but I then had to field a call from work asking me to come in early and then changing their minds because the supervisor in question hadn't done the math properly and my coming in early wouldn't actually help anything. After that I had to field a call from my mortgage specialist because the auditor apparently decided that the mountain of paperwork I provided was not, in fact, enough to meet all of my financing conditions for the house. *headdesk* So I have had to send even more paperwork to prove I am not an evil money launderer trying to get a mortgage to launder the rest of my ill-gotten gains through a rural property in Southwestern Ontario.

So, yes. Very much looking forward to my bed now.

Okay. I am going to go heat the last of my lunch and wait for the shift to be over. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

It really does feel like my days just zoom by, and I have nothing to show for them except working and sleeping. I haven't even been cooking much during the past couple of weeks because of my evening and night shifts. Yes, I ran a metric fuckton of errands last week, and to a lesser extent this week, and somehow I still feel like I accomplished nothing.

It's possible I'm being too hard on myself, but other people are out there doing the same job as me but also raising children and running Girl Guide groups and playing sports in the evenings and going on dates and tripes with their spouses. Several of the younger women here play hockey or socker or whatever else, and a couple of days ago they were talking about a game they played that started at 10pm. Just, no. If I'm not working a shift, at 10pm I am asleep. I don't leave the house after 7pm most of the time, let alone go play a freaking sport at 10pm. *shakes head incredulously* Now, to be fair, these young women are literally half my age--not a one of them is a day over 25, and maybe at their age I had a bit more get-up-and-go than I do now, but my get-up-and-go got-up-and-went a long time ago. I am tired just thinking about this, quite frankly.

Since KK was working from home today, I left my bedroom door open a little in case Octavia (my youngest kitty, who will be turning eleven this May *sob*) wanted to come have a cuddle. She doesn't get much unadulterated cuddle time anymore, because the dogs' crates are in my bedroom, and I have to keep the door closed for a number of reasons. The primary reason is that KK's dog Rika likes to come in my room and poop under my bed. The second reason is that if my dogs spot any cats coming into the room, they scream the place down, and no one gets any sleep. So the poor cats are exiled unless I'm working night shifts and KK is working from home and can keep the dogs downstairs. Normally either Juno or Octavia will come keep me company, but today there was no sign of Juno, and Octavia decided to come into my room and stand by the door and scream at me instead of cuddling. It was actually quite funny, but also I was a little sad because I would have loved some uninterrupted cuddle time with her. Ah, cats. What can you do?

Tomorrow is the monthly meeting of Ministry & Counsel, and we are discussing the State of Society Report. Our clerk sent us a draft that they had put together, and at the risk of sounding extremely mean, it was both incredibly lackluster and somehow also managed to make me rage at the same time. The latter was because the clerk wrote "the threat of Covid 19 has waned," and NO, I CANNOT STRESS HOW MUCH IT HAS NOT WANED. Fuck everything. This is a person whom I know is Covid-cautious, does not attend Meeting in person, is careful about masking, etc. WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THAT? I feel like I'm being gaslit. Anyway, I sent back much politer comments to that effect, and hopefully we will be able to get that sentence either stricken or altered, because JFC I will not stand for Covid minimizing in my community. I will NOT.

*breathes deeply*

ANYWAY. The rest of the report felt super flat, as if the clerk couldn't muster any enthusiasm for any of it. They wrote a better report last year, so I know it's not just their writing style, or whatever. I don't know if they are struggling or maybe a little depressed or what, but it felt like kind of a depressing read. I'm hoping that if we all provide some extra input tomorrow we'll be able to make it a little nicer. One of the members has yet again accidentally double-booked herself tomorrow, and I am trying to scrape some compassion from the bottom of the empty barrel of my soul. She has ADHD as well, and I get it--the struggle is real. But I for the most part (with one single exception) have managed to be present and on time for every meeting, and she is routinely late or doesn't show up at all, and she's usually late because she's decided to do something right before the meeting (like go to a busy restaurant with her husband), or lost track of the time, or didn't realize she'd booked a conflicting appointment. And another member keeps vanishing on extended trips with his wife or cancelling because he doesn't plan his freelance work gigs properly. Like, folks, COME ON. I am the youngest in our committee by about fifteen years and I am the only one with a full-time job that requires my presence in an office, and yet I manage to put things in my calendar and be on time. I'm not the clerk, so it's not my job to herd the cats, but it's incredibly frustrating to constantly have people missing the one hour a month we all committed to.

/end rant

I am apparently in a MOOD today. :P Sorry for the slight bummer of a post. I will end on a good note, and say that I renewed my community garden plot today, and received the good news that I am being moved away from Mosquitoville and to a better, more accessible plot! I am no longer relegated to the back corner where there was no sun and ALLLLLL the mosquitoes and the ground was full of roots. This is good news on so many fronts, I can't even begin to tell you. Trying to garden in that back plot felt like a punishment. Hopefully this year I won't have to have as many fights with my plot in order to get anything to grow in it. I will need to transplant all the perennials I put in my plot last year, but that's not that big of a deal, I don't think. I may ask for some friends to help me with that, particularly transplanting the asparagus that I carefully planted last year, so that I don't have to do it all on my own and risk damaging the plants.

If I have time tonight I will pull out my seed list (although it's missing a couple of things that I need to add from my seed box) and start planning what I want to put in my garden this year.