Corner of Bourbon & Division

... and I'm going to call it "Good Intentions."

Okay, not really, but I still enjoy that joke a lot. Anyway, today's good intentions fell by the wayside in favour of a nap. I've been extra tired since I started working shifts again right before Christmas (I wasn't officially back on rotation, but I was asked to cover for other people's absences, so I've been de facto back on shift for about a month now, even before I was officially told I was back on shift), and I don't foresee that changing any time soon. What I will need to change is my response to it. I got used to being less tired, so now that I'm going back to baseline levels of borderline exhaustion, I will have to get used to pushing through it all again. It's getting harder as I get older, but I don't have much of a choice if I want to actually get anything done ever again.

I was also tired because Ben decided 5am was a great time to start screaming at me (he either wanted to be fed or let out of the room or both), and of course that awoke Pixie, which meant that I had to get up in a hurry or else face the Puppy Apocalypse. Pixie, unlike Peggy, is not the type to settle herself back down after a few minutes of crying. She barks and shrieks and howls, and then she thoroughly soils her crate because she's got herself so worked up, and then she thrashes around in her own poop for good measure. So rather than put myself through having to bathe the puppy at the ass-crack of dawn I scrambled out of bed to let her outside, and that meant that I was up for the day at 5am instead of 7am the way I'd planned. *sigh* So, yeah. Tired.

I'm strongly considering getting an Instant Pot, despite my reluctance to add another kitchen gadget to my inventory. The issue is mainly one of space in the kitchen (or lack thereof), but now that I'm cooking almost every day for me and KK due to her dietary preferences (I can't do what I used to do, which is make one big meal or two once a week and subsist on leftovers), I feel that it would save me a lot of time and effort to be able to just chuck things in the Instant Pot and not have to worry too much about dinner every single night.

I got two things done today: dishes, and bringing the dogs to training. I decided today that I'm not going to bring them to hunting training until the spring after this, though. When I went to pick them up, it looked like the trainer hadn't gone in all day, and left them without water for the whole day, which is unacceptable in my books. I think that no matter what he says, he's not really ready to take on clients after his big move last October/November, and so I'm going to give him until the beginning of April to get his shit together before I trust him with my dogs again. Even then, he's kind of on notice. You can't just leave dogs all day with no water, and the reason I'm paying him is not so that my dogs stay locked in a kennel all day--I pay him so they'll get training and exercise. I'm not best pleased.

Tonight I have locked Ben out of my bedroom so I can get a full night's sleep. The plan for tomorrow is to bring all the dogs to daycare (not training), then run a bunch of errands, and then if I have time I want to clean and rearrange my bedroom in the hopes of making more space in it. It's a very large room (17' x 12'), but currently it feels quite cramped as it's got my queen-sized bed, my night table, a small glass coffee table that used to be a side table in the living room that I moved when KK moved in, my dresser, a portable a/c unit (for hot summer nights), a small bookcase, both my CD stands, two large dog crates (one for Peggy, one for Pixie), my computer desk and chair, and two lamps, plus a large cardboard box of linens and a couple of plastic recycling bins stacked up by the foot of the bed because I didn't know where else to put them. The plan is to clear out the linens and the recycling bins, and maybe find a different home for the table and rearrange the lamps so they're less in the way. Then I want to turn my desk so it's facing the bed instead of the door in a bid to make the space feel larger even if it technically takes up the same square footage.

I don't know if I can get it all done, but I will at least try to get some, if not most of it done.

I am on the computer at work that blocks Dreamwidth, so I will have to repost this there at some point tomorrow. I don't know why the firewall is okay with LiveJournal and not Dreamwidth--the ways of the firewall are many and mysterious.

I didn't sleep especially well today. I stayed up until nearly 10:00 because I needed to bring the dogs to daycare, and KK doesn't get up until nearly 8:00 (which is when she starts work), and her dog Lidan sleeps with her. Up until recently that wasn't a problem, because I could open her door and call Lidan to come, except for the past couple of months he refuses to leave her bed, and while in the past I used to be able to bribe him to come out with treats, that has also stopped working. I am NOT comfortable just barging into her bedroom (standing in the doorway behind the baby gate we use to keep my dogs out of her room already feels like I'm invading her space), and while I have left Lidan at home a couple of times in the past, I don't want him to miss out on daycare, so the simplest solution is to just wait until she wakes up. The times I've left him are when she was off work, and since on those days she typically won't get up until anywhere between 11:00 and 13:00, I felt okay with my choice to not wait.

Anyway, between wrangling all three dogs to daycare and then coming home, dealing with some minor morning chores and whatnot, I didn't get to sleep until about 9:45, and then I had to set my alarm for 11:45 because I had a therapy appointment at 12:00. I've scaled back my therapy sessions to one a month, and they've all been set in advance (long before I found out I was going back on shift), so I didn't want to cancel and wait until the end of February to talk to my therapist. Two months is a little long between sessions for me, although a month is pretty comfortable right now. Then after my therapy appointment (over Zoom) I got pinged by someone about a Discord server I manage, and what I thought would be a two-minute exchange turned into something somewhat longer, and I didn't get back to sleep until about 14:00, and so when my alarm went off at 16:30 I was a rather tired camper.

KK is in charge of picking up the dogs from daycare when I work nights (and driving them to daycare when I'm on days), so I was able to get dressed and go to work without too much fuss. I do miss hanging out with the fur kids in the evenings, I must say. I drop them at daycare and then don't see them for basically 24 hours. The daycare is very good for them--socialisation and exercise, yay!--but I selfishly miss having them around when I'm home (even though it's much easier to sleep during the day when they're not there). Tomorrow morning I will be taking Peggy and Pixie to their hunting trainer in Metcalfe, where they will spend most of the day again, and again I am kind of sad about it, but also the exercise and discipline does wonders for them--I can see the changes in their behaviour after even just a couple of days of relative inactivity at home. A tired dog is a good dog, as they say, and Brittanys need both physical and mental stimulation to tire them out properly. I'm also being a little watchful about their activity levels because the breed tends to become overweight easily, which is hard on their joints, and Peggy especially already has slightly wonky hips, so I don't want to put any additional pressure on there if it can be helped (and definitely not while she's still young and the only reason for inactivity is my own laziness and/or lack of time and energy).

I am currently procrastinating on a proposal that my boss has asked me to write for him. This is mostly because even though I've asked him several times for clarification on what he wants, he hasn't actually provided it to me. I think it's that he doesn't truly know what he wants, or at the very least he's not able to articulate it clearly. He comes from an operational background, and his attitude has always been "just get it done and we'll deal with the rest later," which makes putting things in writing rather difficult. Honestly, if we could get away with not writing this proposal at all I think he'd be way happier, but we need to have something succinct yet complete to present to the DG so that we can proceed with the actual thing we're proposing, which is a comprehensive development plan for our current supervisory team.

Right now our whole team at work is extremely green in terms of experience. I am the employee who's been here the longest, at eight and a half years. After that, we have two employees who've been here for five years, two for four years, and all the rest have three years or less with us. We're about to hire three new people, which will put 25% of our staff at less than one year of service. The supervisors, apart from me, all have two years' experience or less in their current roles, and that lack of experience has been showing up in the form of miscommunications, interpersonal conflicts, and a couple of pretty significant mistakes getting made in the past few months. Therefore, my boss wants me to put together a program that will help the supervisory team to build on their strengths, shore up their weaknesses, and generally level them up to where they can be effective team leaders. The main issue is that I asked him what his end goal looked like (so that I could actually come up with a plan to achieve that goal), and he just kind of vaguely flapped his hands at me and told me he trusted me to make it all happen.

*rips out hair*

It's nice to be trusted, but also ARGH. I'm sure it will be okay, but I truly dislike not knowing what I'm aiming for, and that is lending itself to an impressive amount of procrastination (including this LJ post, I am not going to lie). Now that I have complained about it, I will get back to the work and see what I can come up with. Worst case scenario, my boss won't like it and he'll ask me to do something different. I will have spent a few hours on it (aside from the time I've spent thinking about it and consulting with the supervisors to get their perspective on things), and I will learn from the experience and move on. I'm definitely making a mountain out of a molehill on this.

 Those of you who are more recent arrivals to this LJ (i.e. less than ten years ago, ahem) may not know that I actually have crazy nutbar prepper tendencies at heart. One of the reasons I've always wanted a hobby farm is to be more self-sufficient. I don't have any delusions about rugged homesteading and becoming 100% self-sufficient, because that's just not feasible, no matter what the Libertarians would have you believe. ;) Nonetheless, being less reliant on The System(TM) has always been an aspiration of mine.( Doooooooom... )

So, yeah, I really should found that company called "Good Intentions Asphalt and Cement."

I keep telling myself I should update more, and then more life stuff happens, and then I get overwhelmed with how much I'd have to write to get everyone up to speed, and so I just... don't post. Not my most shining moments, let me tell you.

( Cut because of triggers for mental illness and weight/body image issues )

Did I tell you my plans of taking dog training courses and eventually opening up my own business? I think I did. Anyway, the first semester is over, and the theory is going really well. The practice? Not so much. We're observing one of the puppy classes (which is going fine), and then doing basic obedience with our own dogs, following the new curriculum. The problem is that poor Sergent's anxiety levels go through the roof when he's in that class. First he has to sit or lie quietly for an hour during the puppy class behind a board so the puppies can't see him, and that stresses him out (because he can hear the high-energy puppies and can't see them and isn't free to move around). By the time obedience class comes around he's a nervous wreck. On several occasions he nearly pulled my shoulder out of its socket trying to get to the exit, poor thing. Of course, when he's that stressed he can't learn, and having him learn is a big part of how I'm being evaluated. So I have no idea if I'm going to pass this class or not. I also need to take Sergent to the vet, because I think the anxiety is making him chew his paws and his side, but I want to make sure it's just that and not a sign of something worse.

If I do pass, I've decided to skip the spring semester and do the fall semester instead. I've found it extremely punishing on my body and my schedule to do these classes, and I could use the break until September. Not to mention the finances. These classes are extremely expensive. In the meantime, I'm going to educate myself on how to start up my own business, and see if it's something I can realistically do.

Anyway, I have to jet to work. See you on the flip side!