Corner of Bourbon & Division

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!

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.

I am too easily distracted, it seems. I keep remembering to post LiveJournal when I'm away from the computer, and then forgetting when I'm finally at the computer.

Things are chugging along at Casa Phnee.

Work has been busy. I had to come in for more overtime this week, which would have been fine had I known in advance that they were planning [Important Redacted Event]. I managed well enough, but having it sprung on me at the last minute was unfortunate. Also, the newbie that I wasn't supposed to train was once again given to me to train for two days this week, while I was still wrangling my current newbie. After this newbie #2 is going to another shift, so I won't have to wear three or four hats at once anymore, thank goodness.

Also, as it turns out, one of the other supervisors (I need to start coming up with code names for them for LJ purposes) threw herself on a scheduling grenade for my sake, and that has allowed me to take actual vacation time starting on Wednesday. I can't even tell you what a relief that is, especially after my first request for vacation in July was denied. I'm hoping to use the nearly two weeks of downtime to good effect, as I'm quite literally exhausted. I've been dragging myself around, scraping from RTO to RTO (RTO is "Regular Time Off," which is what a weekend would be for people who work normal jobs), and barely holding it together because most of my RTOs have been interrupted due to overtime, meaning I haven't had the opportunity to properly rest in a very long time.

Thursday was my monthly Cooking Day with the awesome ai731, who apparently still reads my LJ. Hi! *waves* I love our cooking days. We've been doing them for about a year and a half now, getting together once a month and spending the entire time making super yummy and healthy (mostly) meals to be put in the freezer, thus guaranteeing we have meals for almost the entire month. During that time we catch up on what's been going on in each other's lives, and talk about all the fun stuff we're into: crafts and volunteering and gardening and self-sufficiency and writing and fandom. Good times all around.

So this time around she showed me the vast improvements she and her husband t! (no longer on LJ, if memory serves) had done to their lovely house out in the country. She decided to follow the method outlined in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and her enthusiasm for it and the very visible results in her house have inspired me to give it a shot. I was leery at first, because some of the advice sounds daunting (the author, for instance, seems to think that books are an easy thing to get rid of, which, if you're me, is not true in the slightest), but I asked a bunch of questions, and it does sound like this might be a useful exercise for me to try. No idea if it will work, as I am a horrible procrastinator and I cling to my stuff, but I am going to snag the book from my local library or maybe try to find it second-hand, and give it a go. If nothing else, it may inspire me to clear out my junk drawer. ;)

The plan this week is, once I'm done with work, to take two days to do not much and just get some much-needed sleep. I will take Sergent for some extra-long walks, and spend more time than usual in the community garden. On Saturday I have a date in Montreal with my friends toughlovemuse and owldaughter to finally see Captain America: Civil War (where I will probably cry over Steve and Bucky a lot), Starting next Monday and going until the Friday, the plan is to use my free time to declutter the house. Only time will tell if I actually follow said plan, because I am usually terrible at this kind of follow through.

Okay, I am not dead. Promise, and cross my heart!

I am FINALLY starting to get my life back. As of last Thursday I once again have a floor in the basement (though still no walls), and this morning t! came to help me move the furniture back into the basement.

Tonight I get to sleep in my own bed again! I am ridiculously excited. \o/


In the meantime, I am leaving on Wednesday at some point for two weeks to be operational support for the G8/G20 Summit taking place in Ontario.

When I get back, there are plans. For one, it's possible I might go on a fishing trip. fearsclave accompanied me to get geared up, and I am now the proud owner of a bunch of fishing equipment. He, Carolyn and I christened my rod with a crappie and a bass, and I am anxious to get back out on the water. Yay fishing!


Also, if there's one thing that this basement debacle has served to bring home to me, it's that I have too much stuff. So the other project is to do a massive declutter of the place. Get rid of papers and the like, and most of the Stuff that seems to accumulate without having a real purpose. Oh, and clothes. I have lots of clothes that don't fit anymore, and those are all going, either tossed or to Goodwill, depending on what state they're in.


So, yeah. As you can see, my life is really not very exciting these days. Hopefully when I'm back from Ontario I'll be around a little bit more.

Sorry for falling off the face of the planet, there. I'm doing my best to climb back on, but someone seems to have coated the surface with Vaseline. :P

Happy trails!

So after I posted yesterday I got a message from ai731 letting me know that there are appraisers coming in today at 9:30 to see the place.

:::cue panicked flailing:::

There wasn't all that much panicking, as it happens. I've been cleaning steadily, in short bursts every day, for a month, minus the week in Paris. I had even done a blitz on the bedroom the day before, which had rendered it a good deal tidier than before (although by no means tidy).

So after I took George to the vet, I spent the evening cleaning. ( Digression about the vet )

( Nattering about cleaning )

I have things about work to post about, but that will wait for another post.