Corner of Bourbon & Division

WE MADE IT.

The sellers got us the necessary paperwork so that I am not legally responsible for their financial shenanigans. Wafik was not in the office today, but I was able to get hold of Peggy, the person who got my mortgage approved a couple of months ago, and after a nerve-wracking five hours I was finally able to go to the downtown branch of the credit union and get the bank draft I needed.

I then drove like a bat out of hell to Alexandria in an attempt to get the thing to my lawyer. She told me she needed it by 2:30pm or 3:00pm at the very latest, and unfortunately I was not able to bend the laws of space and time to get there on time, but I did get there at 3:15, which is honestly a fucking miracle.

Then my lawyer pulled a miracle out of her ass and managed to register everything at 4:59pm (you can't register anything past 5pm) and joked that I was the record-holder for that.

So I now own a house! Or, rather, I now am responsible for a mortgage that allows me to live in a house! YAY! There is a lockbox on the door, apparently, where I can get the house keys, so we will be checking that on Thursday when we start bringing stuff to the house ahead of the movers. I want to bring a lot of my gardening equipment (the loose stuff that's hard to pack), all of our plants, and a bunch of the loose stuff that's in the basement.

KK finally started packing over the weekend, and I am trying super hard not to micromanage her, but it is so hard to resist. For all that she is super organized about a ton of things in life, she is absolute dogshit at packing. She actually packed up most of the packing supplies! Like, WHY. We aren't even close to done, why would you pack up all but one Sharpie and one boxcutter? Bonkers. Her method of packing is also super haphazard, AND she hasn't been properly labelling the boxes. Yes, she's identifying which room they go in, but she hasn't been listing the contents on the outside like a normal person. Right now she has something like five boxes labelled "desk stuff." Not only that, but she is using up so much money's worth of packing supplies (paper and bubble wrap and the like) that we ran out after she packed fewer than four boxes of dishes from her china cabinet. I was honestly flummoxed when she said we'd run out this morning. I expected her to use some of it before I came home, but ALL of it? Good fucking Lord. *screams in frustration*

At least she has agreed to buy more packing supplies for us tomorrow and picked up more bubble wrap and paper today (she also went through half of that, which is mind-boggling to me), because so far I have paid for everything in this move: the supplies, the movers, and the professional organizer, not to mention the house itself and the lawyer's fees. So it's nice that she's finally contributing a bit. She has plans to pitch in for moving costs using her tax return, which she still hasn't submitted for last year's taxes (she is also terrible at filing her taxes on time), but that won't happen until at least next week, so I'm not counting on that.

In short, I am trying to stay out of her way while she packs, and am concentrating on other areas of the house. I lost a lot of packing time to all of the legal and financial shenanigans over the past few days, but I have very generous friends coming tomorrow to help, so I am going to ask them to help KK pack up the kitchen, and I am going to give explicit instructions on how to label the boxes so that I know what's in them when we move. Then while they're working on the main floor I will tackle my bedroom and the "cat room.," which is mostly books and my office supplies. If I work very hard I might be able to get the "cat room" completely done and put a significant dent in my bedroom. I really hope so, because otherwise I basically only have Wednesday to get everything else packed up, because Thursday we'll be loading up the U-Haul truck I rented to bring the aforementioned stuff to the property, and Friday is moving day, so 99% of the packing needs to be done before Friday morning hits.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that, while I was gone today, Pixie busted out of her collar in the back yard and took off after a rabbit. KK messaged me to let me know it happened, and of course I was still 30 minutes away and could do fuck-all about it. Luckily KK was able to find her pretty quickly and entice her into the car once she'd run herself ragged. That shaved another few years off my life too, stupid dog. It would have been just our luck for her to be hit by a car and killed mere days before she gets a whole four acres to romp around. Christ.

I am going to stop here. I was so stressed out last night that I didn't fall asleep until nearly 1:00am, and as a result I am completely fried today. So I'm going to try to be asleep before 11:00pm. That's not super early by my standards anyway, but it's nearly 10:00pm now, so I can't expect miracles.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

 Well, the good-ish news is that I think I've got a good chance of getting all my financial ducks in a row by Monday. A whole bunch of people have pulled together at various financial institutions to help me make this happen, and so while it's not guaranteed/a done deal, I have done everything within my power to make it a reality. I am reasonably confident it will work out.

So, yay for that!

Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends. I went to see my real estate lawyer to sign all the paperwork for the closing on Monday, and got some more bad news.

It turns out that the sellers are leveraged up to their eyeballs. They have two mortgages on the property, neither of which have been paid at all, and they conveniently did not disclose that the central A/C unit they supposedly own is not actually paid for, and the property has a lien on it as a result. None of this is a problem per se, because the sale agreement stipulates that I am not responsible for any liens on the property. However, they and/or their lawyer have not provided all the proper legal documentation that stipulates that they are taking responsibility for the lien and all of the debt. Without those documents, I can't sign the closing on the house because I'd run the chance of taking on the liability, which I do not want at all, no thank you.

The sellers have until Monday (the official closing date) to produce said documentation. If they don't, we're in a bit of trouble. My lawyer has said we can close on Tuesday at the latest. Otherwise, she will petition for occupancy if they don't cough up the paperwork, meaning KK and I can move in on Friday as planned, but we will not own the house until such time as all the paperwork is in order. If we don't get occupancy, in theory the sellers would be on the hook for any expenses we incur while we don't move (like needing to live in a hotel, putting our stuff in storage, etc.), but my lawyer rightfully pointed out that, given the sellers' financial status, "you can't get water from a stone."

Blargh.

It feels like the universe is trying to shave several decades out of my life from sheer anxiety. Weirdly, I am less stressed out about this than I was about the financial bullshit that happened yesterday. Finances are a big red panic button issue for me, but legal documentation doesn't appear to fall into the same category. I won't know until Monday if the sellers have produced all the necessary documentation, so I guess I get to worry about it all weekend. Hurray.

Okay. Time to go feed and water the quail, and then head to bed, since I'm working all weekend. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I am very grumpy about having to get up early to go to the credit union to sign all my mortgage paperwork. The experience wasn't terrible, but it didn't have much going for it. First I got caught in long weekend rush hour traffic on my way there, and arrived exactly on the nose, only to get very turned around because not a single solitary door had a number or a label on it. It turned out the office wasn't even accessible from the main building lobby, it had a separate entrance at the back of the building. I had to call the representative for directions, and he came to get me.

The representative was very nice, but he had not anticipated having the kind of client who carefully reads all documentation before signing it, so it took a lot longer to get through the appointment than the time he'd budgeted. I regret nothing. ;) However, there was a glitch in the computer system when it came time to sign up for the insurance portion of the mortgage, and there was no way to fix it, since the automated system had gone into "weekend mode" (his term) and there was no one from IT available outside of office hours. So in order not to delay the payout of the mortgage I had to waive the insurance portion, which makes me very uncomfy, but the representative assured me that we can fix that next week.

All in all, I did not enjoy the process.

I've been mostly talking about my own problems here lately, but the world continues to be on fire. Carney, our new Prime Minister, went on an official visit to the White House last week, and to all appearances held his own with a fair bit of aplomb. There was an entertaining amount of Canadian passive-aggressiveness, some very amusing side-eyes at the camera, and lots of backhanded compliments that Trump took completely at face value. 

I still have a lot of doubts about Carney. His focus has been mostly on the economy and fixing the housing crisis, and he's pledged to massively increase defense spending and car manufacturing, and needless to say, I don't share those priorities, especially not car manufacturing. Given the current climate change crisis, we should be moving well away from cars and investing in robust public transit and 15-minute accessible cities. But noooo, cars uber alles, I guess. Ugh. He's also eliminated the cabinet positions devoted to people with disabilities and women and gender equality issues, which is a huge step back for the country, especially given the meagre progress we've made on that front to begin with. I am really unimpressed with that.

At least India and Pakistan appear to have backed off plunging the entire world into nuclear winter. The USA continues its horrendous slide into fascism, with the firing of the Librarian of Congress (the first black woman to ever occupy the post, appointed by Obama, back when the world still seemed sane), ICE grabbing people off the streets and leaving their minor children stranded there, and DOGE continuing to wreak havoc across all government departments.

Watching the USA go down like this feels a little like watching a friend who was always a little unstable succumb to a drug addiction. You always worried about them in the past, and now you're worried that not only are they going to self-destruct, they're going to take you down with them and burn your house down too for good measure.

*sigh*

I am really looking forward to my bed. I have about four and a half hours before my shift is over, and I do want to stop at the local U-Haul store (luckily a five-minute drive from my house) and pick up more boxes, because Monday is a statutory holiday and I won't be able to get them then. And then I plan to do all the sleeping.

I think that's it for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Yes, I am back-dating this post by one hour so it shows up as being written on April 5th instead of the 6th. It's nearly 1am but it doesn't count as tomorrow because I haven't gone to bed yet. My reasoning is flawless and I will not be taking questions at this time.

So, I may have bought quail at the bird auction. Ahem. They are SO CUTE. I will attempt a longer post about this tomorrow because a lot happened today and I desperately need to go to bed and get some sleep, even if it's crappy sleep. But yes, I bought quail. The lot I bid for and won was a mix of three males and three hens, and they appear to be in pretty good health, although it's obvious the females have been overbred because their backs are in various stages of denudement. Poor biddies. I have separated them for now to give the poor hens a break from their overzealous boyfriends, and the six of them are in quarantine in the laundry room where they will stay for the next two weeks. I don't want them in contact with the cats just in case they're carrying bird flu, which cats are highly susceptible to (at least the current variants of H5N1 floating around out there). 

I visited Dylan and Sarah, who very kindly supplied me with a couple of days' worth of layer feed and some hardware cloth to put over the Rubbermaid bin in which the birds will be spending their quarantine time, and I gave them a bunch of booze that I decluttered from my kitchen last week. The booze was still good, it just wasn't likely to ever get drunk at my house, so now it has gone to a good home where it will be appreciated. 

I came home and got the quail settled and then did the Quaker announcements, and then had the misfortune of checking my emails, all of which had semi-bad news about the house purchase. Namely, all of the emails involve my having to jump through more expensive and flaming hoops in the hopes of getting the financing completely approved for the house. The desktop appraisal now costs $40 because there's acreage, even though it's a DESKTOP appraisal, meaning no one is actually physically going out to the property and they are all staying at their DESKS, so I can't see how adding some land on top of that makes their job THAT much more difficult or complicated. They gave me the option to decline the extra charge, but of course that means they won't perform the appraisal, so they're holding my house purchase hostage unless I pay them more money.

Also, my beloved father insists that he can't get a pdf statement of his bank records because his bank "doesn't give him the option." Except he and I use the same bank, and I have personally obtained pdf statements of my bank records from the online banking site. IT'S NOT HARD. But my father is eighty-three years old, and this is kind of what happens once technology gets a little bit more complicated than you can wrap your brain around. I have noticed it happening to me too with things like TikTok and video editing software: I can manage the very basics, but the bells and whistles are beyond me unless someone sits with me and takes the time to explain things. So I think the best but unfortunately inconvenient solution is to go to Montreal tomorrow and physically show him how to do it, and to also have him sign the letter saying he is giving me the money in person, so that I can then just scan everything myself as a pdf to send to my mortgage broker.

*lies on the floor*

And my mortgage broker still wants me to provide my quarterly statement for my RRSP for the first quarter of the year, which the bank HASN'T PRODUCED YET. I am not sure how she thinks I can influence an entire financial institution to move up their timeline for documents just for my benefit. News flash: they do not give two wet shits about me or my piddly little RRSP. 

*rips out hair and rolls around on the floor for a bit*

So yeah, Today has been a bit of a mixed bag. XD

Yesterday an internet meme destroyed a hedge fund.

Okay, I am being flippant, but you have to admit, it's pretty cool. Right up front, I wish to be clear: I do NOT understand the stock market. It's always been a whole bunch of wealthy people playing with imaginary money in order to make themselves more wealthy, and often ruining the lives of regular people in the process because they engage in SUPER FUCKING SHADY practices.

Case in point: shorting stock. The nutshell version is that the hedge fund in question (and others) decided to short the stock of GameStop, which has been in peril for a little while due to their business model (they're from the era of brick-and-mortar stores and are poised to try to go digital, but I am honestly not sure how well they're doing with that). However, they shorted the stock by more than 100%, and some observant people on Reddit (the subreddit r/wallstreetbets to be precise) noticed it. Those observant people made, as I understand it, a bunch of jokes/memes along the lines of "LOL wouldn't it be hilarious if we all started buying GameStop stock and made the price skyrocket, because it would really fuck over that hedge fund!"

And, uh, it worked. The meme caught on, people started buying stock using apps like Robinhood (which allow amateurs to play the stock market without commission fees), and the stock price went from somewhere around $17 at the beginning of the year to over $400 the last time I checked. Wall Street freaked out. The USA freaked out. Wall Street tried to appeal to the government, and suddenly social media went from "Hey, isn't this a fun prank" to "BLEED THE RICH UNTIL THEY'RE READY TO BE EATEN!" More and more small investors jumped on board, and a lot of the early buyers made bank. There are some really incredible stories coming out about people eliminating student or medical debt, of making enough money to pay for long-term care for their chronically ill loved ones, all sorts of things. It's mind-blowing, mostly because it's such an object lesson in how money and investments SHOULD be spent: on improving people's lives, and not on making the hyper-wealthy even wealthier.

Anyway, Shit Went Down because suddenly the Robinhood app mysteriously decided to stop people from trading... something-something-technicality-something-I-didn't-understand-because-stock-market. ANYWAY, basically the hyper-wealthy are applying pressure every which way they can, and it's not working super well for them this time around. The main hedge fund that shorted GameStop has lost billions of dollars. I saw a screencap of a post by someone named Zi Teng Wang which said, among other things: "It turns out that wealth does trickle down, you just have to make them bleed first," and DAMN, SIR.

I STILL don't understand how shorting a stock can be legal. How can you sell something that you don't own? (Multiple people have explained it to me, and just... if you are renting something, you should not be able to sell it, because it does not belong to you. What the fuck even.)

I meant to write about other things today, but I felt I should note this for my future self to read and remember how absolutely bananas this month has been.

 I don't know why I constantly overestimate my level of energy to get things done. I am an eternal optimist, I guess. Anyway, I got a fair bit done this week. I got 95% of my errands done (I forgot a couple of things, because I was silly and didn't make a proper list), I got a tree which I will decorate probably tomorrow evening, I had my therapy appointment and got my blood tests done this morning. All in all, it wasn't too bad.

( Very, VERY boring daily stuff under the cut. )

Sleep has decided that it is not for me. Between the literal pain in my neck and some other factors, I am looking at another three hours of waiting until Bean and pdaughter get up for the day. So I'm using the time to catch up on Orphan Black, which is getting better with each passing episode. I can't express how much I love this show, and Tatiana Maslany is phenomenal. She basically carries this whole show, and plays anywhere from three to five characters per episode, which just makes my head spin. She always manages to make me forget that it's always her playing these people, because she makes them so different from each other, hair and makeup aside. Granted, she has great writing to work with, but still, even great writing needs a great actress to make it come to life, and this show delivers on both.

The vet decided it would be awesome to send me a card with some of George's fur taped inside it and his paw prints in ink alongside their condolences. I wasn't expecting to see that when I opened the envelope (honestly, I was expecting a reminder for Sergent's surgery), and I almost burst into tears. It might be a nice gesture if your cat died peacefully, but really all it did was stir up the horrific trauma of watching him get his head bashed in by a car and then bleeding to death in my arms. Thanks, vet. That was so thoughtful. >_< Also, it means they must have taken the prints off his corpse. Who even does that? It's gruesome. Christ.

This morning the guys are supposed to show up to build the fence. I really hope they get it done today in spite of what appears to be a suspicious lack of garden gate included with the delivery of the materials in my absence. It sounds like before they start they're going to expect me to saw off several branches of my lilac tree, which is going to be interesting given how much my neck and shoulder hurt. :P Once they're set up and busy building, my plan is to go to Réno Dépot and give them an earful about how rude their subcontractor was with me. This whole situation has been a bit of a shambles ever since I left for Moncton, and I am very displeased with the level of service I received. While I'm there I guess I'll pick up the remaining paving slab I need for the yard. Also, does anyone have any tips on splitting a paving slab diagonally? I have a weirdly shaped empty spot in my arrangement of paving slabs, and if I split one right down the middle it would likely fit almost perfectly, but I have no idea how to do that.  I should pick up a couple of bags of soil and some grass seed for the area around the slabs, too, to make it look a little better.

If they get here early enough I'm also going to take part of the afternoon to take myself clothes shopping (blech). It's a necessary evil, I suppose. My summer wardrobe is no longer appropriate for work at all. It's shabby and worn and most of it has holes in it now. *sigh* If not, I guess the clothes will have to wait until Wednesday, since everything will be closed on Tuesday.

I also have to chase down the guy for the basement floor, because I damned well need to get this house sold and he's been ignoring my calls for two weeks. As it is, my real estate agent tells me that the market dips right after St. Jean Baptiste, so that ship has sailed. At this point I'm wondering if I'm going to need to resign myself to the notion of losing my damned shirt on this house and continuing to haemorrhage money for the foreseeable future. All I can do is hope that I can make it through the next eleven and a half months without going bankrupt or ruining my credit permanently, or both. Although going bankrupt would ruin my credit permanently, I suppose. I don't know, I'm tired and my brain is fried. :P

I am feeling guilty about not using the time I'm awake to get some creative writing done, but honestly I don't have the focus for it right now. The best I can manage is this really disjointed LJ entry. So, uh, lucky you guys, you get to read my 3am ramblings! Isn't that exciting?

That's it for now, I suppose. I can't think of anything else to say.

:::ETA:::

I just remembered I need to go to U-Haul and buy boxes today so I can start packing, too. Tomorrow it'll be closed, and I want to pack then anyway as well as Wednesday, so the longer I wait the less time I'll have for that this week.

Also, laundry. I am in desperate need of a shower, so once everyone is awake I'll take a shower and then do all the laundry. If I can get everything on my list for today done, it will free up the next couple of days for the things that can't be moved around, like birthday parties and vet appointments and dinner with my parents on Wednesday.

So, yeah. Busy busy busy.

I don't have specific subject matter for today's post, so have a series of unrelated paragraphs!

1- Bean is still sick. It's been six straight days of staying home with Mama now, and I think they're both going a little stir-crazy. I'm told that the doctor can't see him until tomorrow, which means a whole week of being kept home from school, and of pdaughter not being able to go to school herself as well. At this point it has to be something like an ear infection, which Bean seems to be unable to shake on his own, so hopefully antibiotics will clear that right up. Luckily, Bean is incredibly good about taking his "ear intekshun tedditzin" and so we never have to fight him on that. Small mercies.

2- I have the dentist today. Again. In spite of my insurance I'm sort of running out of money for this. I think that after this the rest of the dental work will have to wait for a while. There's even less money than usual this month. I'm always stressed about money, but when there's less than half the money that I expected coming in, it puts a serious dent in the budget. We're fine for now, but next month's daycare payment is beginning to worry me.

3- I really hope these next two days turn out better than the weekend. I blame the Olympics for how badly shit has hit the fan. Normally nights and weekends are pretty quiet, but I've been putting out fires since Friday, and I am exhausted. It's been a long string of problems that I don't know how to solve, so I've been run off my feet the whole time, and yesterday I left an hour late. 13-hour days are not my favourite thing, let me tell you.

4- My body clock helpfully woke me up at 3:40 this morning. "Time to get up to go to work!" it said gleefully. Of course, today is a night shift. I went back to sleep, but woke every couple of hours until I resigned myself to the inevitable and got out of bed. The morning has been quiet, at least, before I head out to the dentist, but I have a headache building which Advil and Tylenol aren't doing much to shift. I hope it goes away sooner rather than later.

5- There is no spoon. Or a number 5. Sorry. If I think of something else, I'll post again. Might go back to my old ways of multiple LJ posts a day. Shock! Horror! Actually, probably not. I have Twitter now for random thoughts. ;)

How is the time going by so quickly? I swear, it feels like it was Christmas yesterday.

Because I'd been sent on training courses the past two weeks, it's actually been a while since I worked a full night shift, and so it's sort of kicking my ass this time around. It's a little frightening how quickly I readjust to a daytime schedule. I am not a night owl, never have been. I enjoy going to bed by 22:00 (23:00 at the latest) and getting up around 07:00. That's what my body does naturally, after a few weeks of time off. I don't need an alarm, that's the way my circadian rhythms roll. Of course, this almost never happens, because I rarely have time off, and when I do it's not long enough for my body to reset completely, so unless I set an alarm (or Bean wakes me, or whatever), then I can easily sleep in way past 07:00.

I got a bit of writing done last night, which was nice. It wasn't on any of my current projects, but it was nice to at least get some fiction down on the screen. Perhaps tonight, if work remains quiet, I'll actually manage to work on one of my big projects for the year. It'd be nice to produce something I can get paid for at some point. This month, due to money that we're expecting not coming in for a while yet, things are very very tight. Tight to the point of making me worry if I'll have enough money for gas to get back to Montreal on Monday.

I tried doing the 2nd job thing last year, but as it turns out my memory of hating everything about translating was completely accurate. Much like the last time I did it for a living, it ratcheted up my anxiety to near-unbearable levels. So, that's out. I'm at a loss of what I can do to earn extra income (aside from writing, because while I know it CAN be a source of income, I'm a long ways away from getting anything published. I'd have to finish one of my projects, for one thing), because translation is essentially my one other marketable skill. I do know how to edit & proofread, but I have no formal training and no background to speak of (beta-ing fanfiction doesn't count, pretty sure).

If I worked a different kind of job, I could take on part-time work somewhere. Working a retail/service job would be fine, for what I need. The problem is that my schedule simply won't allow for that. I'd never be able to give my second boss a clear idea of when I'd be available. Also, I'd never be reliably free on nights or weekends, which is when a lot of part-time jobs want people to work. Argh.

Right, moving on.

In unrelated but hilarious news, J. K. Rowling, who refuses to shut up and let her art be art, has come on record as saying she now regrets putting Hermione and Ron together, stating that she did it for personal reasons at the time, but that now "distance has given [her] perspective," and she thinks they're terrible for each other. The internet has re-exploded back into Harry/Hermione vs Ron/Hermione ship wars, seven years later, and mostly I think someone should shove Rowling into a cupboard until she can learn to hold her tongue. I say this with love, and as someone who never had a pony in this particular race. My own love for Harry Potter fell very much in the gen. category, and while the Harry/Ginny thing felt forced, I never much cared one way or another.

A Twitter friend suggested taking Harry Potter away from her now, like taking a drunk's car keys away before they hurt themselves.

"I'm not done."

"We think you've had enough."

"But the relationship between--"

"No. C'mon, let's go let's get you home. You'll feel better in the morning."

"I SHOULD'VE DONE IT DIFFERENTLY!"

"Shh, it's okay, just a few more stairs."

*J.K. Rowling throws up more opinions on the carpet before being put to bed*

I am having a shitty month. So even though I don't post much as a rule, I will likely be posting even less for a while.

I have the completely unhelpful reaction of "Not dealing, can't make me," when it comes to outside stressors. Yes, the head-in-the-sand method that has worked so well for so many others is now serving as my guideline.

Yeah.

Anyway.

If anyone can figure out how to make money spontaneously drop from the sky into my lap, please drop me a line. Otherwise, I implore you to be patient until I have my head surgically removed from my posterior, where it appears to be lodged these days. *headdesk*