Corner of Bourbon & Division

Yesterday I moved to Ottawa.

I've rented a little house that's about a twenty-five minute walk from my job, which is awesome. I am excited at the prospect of driving as little as possible for the foreseeable future. It's smaller than my old house but still offers plenty of room. There is a basement apartment whose tenant I haven't yet met but who seems very quiet so far. I have a teeny-tiny yard and a really big patio, which will be excellent for summer barbecues.

I don't have internet or a home phone yet, so I'll hold off on a long update for now, to try and spare my poor data plan on my phone. Suffice it to say that the move went about as well as I could have hoped. I haven't unpacked much yet, but I plan to over the next few days and weeks, as soon as I've made decisions about where all my stuff should live in the new house. I'm actually pretty exhausted, which in turn for me leads to decision fatigue, hence why I don't know where I want to put my things yet.

The kitten has adjusted well to the new space. She's only six months old, and she lived in a foster home before I got her, so she's used to living in different places. The dog suffered a partial nervous collapse yesterday, but a rawhide bone and a long walk have both gone a long way toward mollifying him.

I'm looking forward to getting settled, to developing actual routines now that I won't have to commute back and forth and live in someone else's house half the time. Once I get over this bone-deep exhaustion, I think this is going to be a really good thing.

I will say that it still feels a little weird and unreal, and that a small part of me keeps assuming that at some point I'm going to head home to Montreal again. I have no idea when that feeling is going to subside, having never been an ex-pat before. I miss my friends and family pretty fiercely right now, even though I'm excited to be embarking on a new adventure.

I hope everyone is keeping well, and I promise to come back and post more regularly once my internet connection is functional!

It's been a year to the day since I moved into my house!

I celebrated by cleaning in the morning, running errands during the day, and showing pdaughter and Bean the house.

Bean and the dog had a grand old time chasing each other around the dining room table.




I capped off the day with two of the three Capricornuciopia boys, planning the next event.

In short, a really good day. Happy anniversary to me!

So I now officially own a house. I am going to be in debt for the next twenty-five years. I'm excited. \o/

Housewarming is tentatively scheduled to coincide with my yearly Hallowe'en party on the 31st, and will start in the afternoon and go into the evening so that people can come as early or late as they wish. :)

So it's looking good for a house. Going to see my agent tomorrow morning, and we will be accepting the counter-offer to the offer I made today on a nice little place in Île Perrot.

It's an almost brand-new house (built in 2009) with a nice, if entirely unused, garden and a really awesome semi-finished basement. It's essentially perfect for my needs right now, nice and accessible, not so far from the city as to be unmanageable in terms of a commute, and there's a fresh fruit & veggie market at the end of my street.

In short, it's a good fit, and I am excited. I hope everything else works out so that, come this time in October, I will be moving into my very own house. :)


This is what the house looks like on the outside.

Three days in a row, holy cow!

I am reconciled to not buying the pretty house. The more I thought about that train yard, the less enamoured I got of the idea of living there. I mean, there was a big old CN truck parked in front of my house with a loudspeaker on it. Not fun. I can't see myself living with that five days out of the week for years. Also, the resale value is crap. Not that I'm buying a house in order to sell it again, but it's something I have to keep in mind, since the odds are good that I will move again in my lifetime.

Today got sacrificed to the Migraine Fairy, alas. There was no house hunting planned, and no announced visits to the building either, so at least I was able to sleep unmolested. I took my pills, went back to bed with an ice pack, and three hours later I am better. That was my body's way of telling me that I've been burning the candle at both ends a little too much this week. House hunting on night shift and having people come by means I'm not getting nearly enough sleep.

So today is my day off. Completely. Sleep and food and relaxing is all that's on the menu.

Tomorrow there will be errands and more looking at houses, and Friday I go back to work.

Isn't my life exciting?


Actually, on a related note, I am hoping next week to start a major de-clutter of the place. I need to get rid of a bunch of stuff before I move, including things I haven't used in months/years. I also have paper clutter piling up in all sorts of places. The apartment is functional, and is tidy enough that I feel okay letting people in, but it's not nearly as tidy as I would like it to be.

I also need to roll up my sleeves and tackle the Amazon Rainforest that's grown up in the back yard. It's really appalling, since I haven't had much of a chance to get out there this summer.


:::ETA::: I forgot to click "post." Aren't I clever?

Hey, what do you guys do with old Christmas and birthday cards? I seem to hang onto mine forever, because people have said nice things to me in them. Except that over the years I've accumulated a LOT of them, and I should probably find another use for all that space, but I feel like I'm being a horrible, ungrateful person throwing away the lovely cards people have written. *facepalm*

The buyers who were supposed to come by the apartment today never showed up, which blew a giant hole in the middle of when I was supposed to be sleeping. I am displeased, but the real estate agent assures me this will not happen again. Time will tell.

I am going back to see the place with which I fell in love tomorrow afternoon. I am taking the Maternal Unit with me, because she has bought and sold lots of houses over her lifetime and I trust her experience in these matters. Her opinion won't make or break the decision to buy, but I want another pair of eyes there in order to potentially dump a bucket of ice water on my head if I need it.

I am about 90% sure that I will be making an offer by this time tomorrow, although that doesn't preclude my continuing to visit other houses during the negotiations. I really hope that no one else buys the house from under me, and that the current owners and I will be able to reach an agreement that's suitable for all.

The short version of the story is that I'm trying very hard to remain level-headed and objective and calm about this whole thing, but really all that's happening is that I have "HOUSE!!!" \o/ \o/ \o/ "HOUSE!!!" on loop in my head. ;)

With one exception, I have declared October to be Buy Nothing Month. (The exception is the first Friday, when fearsclave has generously agreed to take me shopping for a fishing rod and other equipment. Yay!)

So for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be doing some advance preparations for food and the like, so that I have enough to carry me through the month, as well as cat litter and the like. That's not a huge difference, since I try as a rule to have a month's worth of litter and food in the house anyway.

What ought to make a difference, however, is not buying books, a luxury to which I've become altogether too accustomed since I got this latest job. I have a reading list a mile long already, so this will force me to read the stuff I bought on a whim a few months ago and then never got around to reading, without succumbing to current whims.

I'm also going to not use my Communauto car except for one weekend, since I find I have begun relying on it for "frivolous" things that I could as easily do using public transport.

I'm thinking of turning 2010 into an exercise in frugality. After doing some careful math, and figuring out which luxuries I'm not willing to forgo right now (like my gym membership) and what obligations I have to meet no matter what (paying off my RRSP loan), I am going to try to live on 2/3 of my current salary. It would be tight, but I think I can do it. Some of the "savings" will go almost right away to a nifty toy from Lee Valley that I think will be very useful for the garden, as my house is too cold and doesn't get enough sun to start seeds with any success, but all the rest of it is going to go into a "house fund" for the near-ish future.

( Originally this was a quick paragraph about the house plan, but then it turned into a bit of a rant against credit card companies. Sorry. )

This is why Phnee shouldn't ever be allowed onto MLS listings unsupervised.

Pretty house. Pretty pretty house... *sigh*

We'll see how long it lasts. I'm up for another week with overtime, although I'm on days/evenings instead of nights, which is a blessing.

I spent most of last week sleeping. The original plan was to get a whole bunch of stuff done. Instead, my body decided that it was going to put me out of my misery by rendering me unconscious for the better part of five days. When I wasn't asleep, I had just about enough energy to play Dragon Quest VIII (and levelled up a whole bunch). I still cannot get over how much I slept. Appalling.

The weekend was spent at fearsclave's abode in the GFHW, along with toughlovemuse and chibipunkdemon. We went for a walk in the woods, saw a really cute mouse hiding under a log, climbed through a fence and hiked along the railroad tracks. There was knitting and crocheting, and more food than we knew what to do with, and on Saturday night we built a gigantic bonfire, around which we sat and drank scotch and un-scotch, and argued about Harry Potter and various other fun topics. I got tanned and everyone else got sunburned, and we had a fantastic time.

I got back Monday morning in time to pick up Gretzky from the vet (I boarded her there over the weekend because she needs antibiotics twice daily), brought her home, and came to work.

I feel as though I could easily take another two weeks' vacation. I barely saw the week go by, and while I feel okay, I feel about the same as I did before I started the Two Week Marathon Of Night Shift Doom. Luckily, I ought to have some more time off later this summer, unless an operation we have planned soon-ish goes south in a big way, in which case I can kiss my life goodbye.

The only part in all this that's stressing me out is the fact that my apartment is a gigantic unholy mess, yet again. I had it under control for a while, and after the past month it's a disaster. I need to un-disasterify it, first and foremost because I'm likely to be moving sooner rather than later. I have a floor to refinish, and all my stuff to pack, and in the state it is now there's no way in hell I'll ever be able to do any of it.

Gah.

Well, tomorrow is another day. With any luck I will be able to shrug off the feelings of overwhelm and panic and get myself to work on cleaning up, fifteen minutes at a time. That usually works well enough for me, once I get myself in gear.

In other news, my sanity appears to be mostly returned, after the Two Week Marathon Of Night Shift Doom. Whether or not I manage to retain it for the next three weeks remains to be seen.

I am numbering the paragraphs to make it seem as though the disjointedness of this post was intentional:

1- Fell asleep when I got home yesterday. Woke up ten minutes before my alarm this morning. Oops. Guess I needed the sleep. That's one of the good things about being single and having no one dependent on you: you get to make your own sleep schedule without worrying about what effect it'll have on the people around you. Feel like going to sleep at five in the evening? No problem.

2- I have a bunch of things bouncing around in my head. I'm in a poetry mood these days, for one thing. A reading mood, rather than a writing mood. I looked for some volumes by e. e. cummings the other day, but only found a slim volume of "collected works," (i.e. not even his own volumes, but rather someone else's interpretation of how they should be put together) which was going for nearly $30. Gotta say, I wasn't impressed. I fear I may have to resort to Teh Intarwebs for my poetry fix.

3- I seriously, seriously miss the country. I am dying to go back, to get away from the city and the traffic and the pollution and the ick. The fact that the weather is getting nicer every day is only reinforcing this (although it's making being outside increasingly pleasant). Unfortunately, I'm on night shift and working overtime for the next three weeks, and two out of those three weekends are thus a wash.

4- On the plus side, I am seeing my godmother today. One of my two remaining godmothers (I had three, but one passed away back in 2005: it's hard to believe it's been that long), that is. This is the godmother who taught me how to knit, and with whose daughters I grew up, so we're very close even if we don't always see eye-to-eye. I am going to show her my Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt and see what she thinks of it, and then we'll talk about gardening and hooking (rugs) and about her daughters who both live in Europe now. It's been over a year since I last saw her, so we'll have plenty to catch up on.

5- I have been mentally redecorating the downstairs apartment in anticipation of the (still theoretical) day I'm to move in. Never mind that I'm still not sure that I can afford it (I have yet to find out what the actual rent is), and that ai731 and t! (who is no longer on LJ) have not actually found a new home yet. I am very excited. I assume that I will be able to afford it: it shouldn't be *that* much more than my current place, and my current place is well within my means, and then some. My imagination is a very expensive place, let me tell ya: there is a *lot* of furniture in the new place that I don't currently own, and a whole bunch of projects in the works, all in my mind's workshop.

6- The fax machine at work is of Satan. That is all I have to say on that topic.

7- I love the new dispatch system with much love. However, I have *no* love for the current set-up, which makes me crane my neck at a 45-degree angle the entire time. I now have lots of neck and shoulder pain, in spite of my best efforts to get up and stretch regularly. I have volunteered to be at the Admin position this week, partly because I have to get used to the new way of doing things with the new system, but mostly because the computers in here are not set up in a way designed to cripple me within a few short weeks.

I gotta tell you: ow.

Someone is supposed to come and make the place more livable (I'm not the only one complaining of neck/shoulder/arm pain), but they've been saying that for two weeks and thus far there has been no sign of anyone. I am not optimistic.

8- Along with my yen for a house, I also yearn for a dog. I miss having a doggie, as much as I adore the cats. This, too, will come. Just a few more years.

9- Fitness!Girl has been accepted as a regular member of the RCMP. This is good news for her, and semi-good for me. I get a bunch of her overtime, and we get to be even more short-staffed, but it also increases my chances of getting a permanent posting here. There was a goodbye party for her on Saturday with the old crowd from Boomerang, which was quite fun. I'll miss her, though: it was nice to have someone I knew around here. Mind you, I'm pretty well integrated here now, so I no longer need to have her as a back-up. I'm very happy for her: she worked very very hard for this and she deserves it.


There's more, but I can't think of it right now. I think I'll try to make a point of going out for a while at lunch in order to get some sunshine. It's very dark in here, as there are no windows. Makes for a non-cheery atmosphere.