Corner of Bourbon & Division

I have one of those twice-weekly reports to write for work tonight, and it's time-consuming and annoying, so I can't spend too long updating this journal just in case work gets busy later and I don't have time to get the report done. I do not want to have to explain that I didn't get my work done because I was blogging. That would look bad. ;)

I probably shouldn't stress too hard about it, because I routinely take, like, five hours or longer at work to update because I keep getting interrupted anyway. So I'm sure I'll get it all done. This report in particular stresses me out because there are no explicit instructions for how to prepare it, but it's somehow still extremely important to get it done exactly right. *headdesk* Also, I only write one once every four months or because it's specifically a night shift duty and my shift partner and I take turns to do it, so I am woefully lacking in practice. Nothing stresses me out more at work than being asked to do something I'm not familiar with AND for which I have no reliable blueprint. It is objectively the worst.

Tonight is my last night shift, and then I am off until my day shifts next weekend. So far no coworkers have agreed to a shift trade, although I am waiting for that one coworker to get back to me tomorrow (he won't be in until 3pm, though, so I won't find out until late in the day if he's accepted the trade). If he says no, which he likely will, because going from an evening shift directly to a 12 hour day shift with no break is goddamned brutal, I will simply have to suck it up and go to work next weekend.

That give me five days this week and four days next week to get everything packed. Normally I would spend the Monday after my night shifts sleeping, but obviously I can't waste all those precious packing hours on something as silly as sleep, so I'm going to take a brief nap when I get home and then get up and start packing. I have asked KK to help me with packing tomorrow because it's a statutory holiday, but I'm not sure how much help she will actually be. Tomorrow being a stat holiday means that I won't be able to go to U-Haul to buy more boxes, because I'm 99% sure they'll be closed for everyday purchases (albeit likely not for van rentals and that sort of thing), and rightly so. Employees deserve their statutory holidays, and should have the day off like everyone else.

So, yeah. I should probably make some aspirational packing goals for this week, so I'll know how hard I failed by the time the weekend rolls around. ;)

Okay. Report writing time! Wish me luck. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

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!

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!

 I am leaving this entry back-dated to yesterday. Shh, it still counts.

Anyway, I am going to try to recap some of this week, but I don't know if I can do it justice. It has been A Week.

So where I left off on Monday, I was about to drive to Montreal to see to my mother who had just admitted to falling and hitting her head on a chair. At the time she was more upset that there was blood all over her carpet than about the fact that she might have a concussion or other permanent damage. *sigh* I told her to call my aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) who is a retired nurse, and just talk things over with her to make sure there was no immediate danger.

I left KK in charge of all the animals, called work and told them I had a family emergency (RIP to my overtime for Easter Monday, alas, which I really kind of wanted to help defray the cost of the upcoming move), packed my bags and my CPAP and headed to Montreal. I arrived around half past midnight, and of course my mother was waiting up for me. She had a sizeable goose egg on the back of her skull, and there was a blood stain the size of a dinner plate on the bedroom carpet that she was very concerned about. I checked her for obvious signs of concussion and found none (her pupils were equal and reactive to light, she said her head didn't hurt, she knew the date/name of the Prime Minister/etc., and she wasn't nauseated or unbalanced or anything else), so I agreed to have us both sleep and go to the ER in the morning to get her checked out and to check in on my father, who was being kept overnight for additional testing.

During this time I fielded multiple messages from my aunt, and later on a call from my godfather, who had been kind enough to drive my parents to the ER the previous day.

The next morning we had breakfast and, as promised, I drove her to the ER. She proceeded to be a pain in the ass of the triage nurse, because she kept refusing to answer questions and insisting on seeing my father first. I finally put my foot down, and the triage nurse very kindly agreed to let us wait in the same room that my father was in once triage was completed. My father wasn't so much in a room as he was behind a curtain and another flimsy partition to separate him from other patients waiting longer-term in the ER. He was in relatively decent spirits and was obviously very happy to see my mother and then very concerned to hear that she'd taken a spill and hurt herself. There were lots of jokes about how that level of solidarity really wasn't necessary.

The rest of the morning was a real farce. My mother eventually got taken to another exam room, and I had about forty-seven different doctors all wanting my attention in separate places for each parent. The direct path between their rooms was forbidden to me because it was in an area restricted to medical staff, so I had to run the long way around each time and explain myself to a different security guard each time about why I was going back and forth so often. My mother was quickly cleared with a clean bill of health after a physical exam and an ECG to make sure her fall hadn't been the result of a cardiac event, and all the hospital staff kept refusing to believe that she is actually 88 years old. They'd never heard of an 88 year old woman who's never had an ECG in her life. (Money and health privilege is a real thing, folks!)

My father was seen by a lovely French doctor with the demeanour and bedside manner of a hurricane. She was just delightful, but she was a geriatric specialist who was clearly accustomed to dealing with elderly patients who aren't compos mentis, and she directed a barrage of questions at me about my father's cognition levels, his ability to function independently, whether he was able to bathe on his own, etc. I kept gently trying to steer her to ask him the questions, while my father sat there absolutely seething with indignation. I must admit I found it pretty hilarious at the time.

Eventually I was able to take my mother home, but my father was still awaiting several tests and had to stay behind again. I promised him I'd do some grocery shopping, and my mother insisted on coming with me. I convinced her that we should at least have a late lunch, since neither she nor I had eaten since breakfast, and she reluctantly agreed. When we finished tidying up after lunch, my father called me on my cell phone and blithely informed me that A) he'd left the hospital on his own and was at the local pharmacy, and B) the hospital had informed him as he was leaving that he had tested positive for Covid.

*rips out hair*

He refused to let me come pick him up, of course, and insisted on walking home, because he is a stubborn old goat. My mother in the meantime was freaking out, because a Covid diagnosis could be fatal to her due to her COPD/emphysema. She went into full denial immediately, insisting that the hospital had to be wrong, and then once I talked her down from that she got angry at me, mostly because I was the one there to be mad at. Anyway, we went through all five stages of grief in record time, I must say, and she still insisted on coming grocery shopping with me.

Grocery shopping with my mother is an exercise in patience. We had to go through the produce aisle four times and then ask an employee because they didn't have the specific oranges she wanted. "But they ALWAYS have them!" "Clearly they are not here today." "But they ALWAYS do!" And when we asked the employee, they confirmed that they did not, in fact, have those specific oranges, but would we be interested in one of the other five varieties they did have? (We would not, as it turned out.) We got a good chunk of the shopping done, but she also wanted to go to Atwater Market, which turned out to be closed at that hour. If I'd been by myself it probably would have been fine, but my mother is not the speediest person on the planet these days.

Anyway, we got home and found my father returned and in a bit of a bad mood, understandably so. He had brought his prescriptions from the pharmacy, and later on we got my mother's "emergency Covid" prescriptions delivered as well. She is only to take them if she develops symptoms, and they're basically pneumonia buster meds (prednisone and doxycyline). We also gave my mother a home Covid test, which came out negative, at least.

I explained the best practices of quarantining to my parents, and recommended that at minimum if they were in the same room together they should be wearing masks. I also recommended getting a HEPA filter to my mother, and she seemed amenable to the idea. I don't think they will be able to keep up with masking or distancing, because they like being together too much, and they're both terrible at masking for various reasons. *sigh* I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

I also updated my aunt on the latest developments, and called my godfather to let him know about the Covid diagnosis because he was in his presence unmasked for several hours on Monday, so both he and my godmother are at risk of getting Covid (which they both just got a couple of months ago and are barely recovered from).

On Wednesday morning I went out to get more groceries for my parents, enough to keep them stocked up for at least a week so they don't have to worry about going out while my father is still contagious. It might be longer, but they're not set up to keep more food than that, so we did the best we could with what we had. 

Since then I've been checking in when I can, and so far they seem to be doing okay. I have aged about ten years this week, but that was to be expected.

Okay, that is it for the parental unit update. Onward to the rest of this night shift!

Pixie was much improved this morning. She was excited to get out of her kennel and was even more excited to have some plain rice to eat as a snack. Said rice and water stayed where they were supposed to, and while she's not back up to 100% demon spawn levels of energy, she was pretty bouncy all day and counter-surfed, tried to climb the cat tree, and resumed her vigil by the basement gate in case I decided to let her downstairs to eat the quail. So I think she's pretty much on the mend, although I intend to stick to plain rice for at least another day to be on the safe side. 

I was the Greeter for Quaker Meeting today, and it went well. We've had some ruffled feathers in the Meeting of late, because everyone is very much on edge from, well, everything. *gestures broadly* The constitutional crisis in the US, innocent people getting deported to what is essentially a concentration camp in El Salvador (technically it's a prison, but the pictures from there are horrific, with men packed in like sardines, sometimes 80 to a cell, having to sleep standing up, etc.). This is not to say that I believe guilty people should be sent there either. No one, regardless of their status, should be sent to a place like that. Not even the worst, most horrific offenders, because that place is a horror show and even the worst criminals who have committed the most heinous crimes must be treated with a minimum of dignity, because they are human beings.

There's also the Canadian federal election coming up on April 28th. KK and I went to the advance polls today and cast our ballots. There were very few people there today, but CTV news reported that 2 million Canadians went to vote in advance on Friday, which is apparently a record! This is very encouraging indeed. I went over to the Elections Canada website, and of our population of 38,131,104 people, we have 27,642,171 people eligible to vote (i.e. citizens who are 18 years old or older and not the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada). From what I can see we've had a voter turnout that hovers in the 60% range, give or take, for the past 30 years, so I'd love to see more voter engagement this time around. I think I've missed one election in my adult life, although I don't remember which one it was. I have forbears who died for my right to vote, so I'm not about to squander it.

I just had a quick Skype call with my parents, and my mother immediately ratted out my father who apparently passed out today. He tried to blow it off, but I was not having it. I have extricated a promise from him to go see a doctor about it tomorrow. My father had a stroke nearly three years ago, and even though he was very lucky and came out of it with no ill effects, that still puts him at risk for another one. He said he wasn't feeling sick or dizzy, he just lost consciousness for a few seconds. *beats head against the nearest wall* Both my parents are terrible patients, and they tend to be noncompliant with a lot of the treatments they are prescribed as well. To say I am worried about this would be a fucking understatement. I reminded my mother that she had agreed with me that it would be a good idea to get a Life Alert button (or an equivalent, but honestly my research showed that Life Alert is one of the more comprehensive service providers out there), and she once again agreed with me. I don't think I can count on her to get one because I don't think she has the wherewithal to go through the whole process, and my father is pretty resistant to the idea at all. I don't know if I can convince both of them to go through with it, but I am damned well going to try.

Having aging parents is a LOT, y'all.

Okay. I am going to go do a last check on the quail, and then go to bed. I changed out their bedding today (it was *gross*), and they are super happy. They dug and scratched and floofed their feathers and made little nests in the pine shavings and made happy quail noises. It was absolutely adorable. They also laid two more eggs, which is awesome. I think tomorrow I will finally be making a recipe using the quail eggs, now that I have a full dozen (meaning the equivalent of about four chicken eggs).

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I'm still at work for the next little bit, but I'm not sure I'll have time to write anything in depth in that time. The nature of my work is such that interruptions are all but inevitable.

I woke up with my lungs feeling a little sore, but some quick googling tells me that's not uncommon when first starting to use a CPAP, because your lungs are filling up a bit more than they're accustomed to at night, and your chest muscles work a little harder to exhale against the forced air. The discomfort didn't last very long, so I'm not too worried about it.

The quail laid a second egg for me this morning! They've been steadily laying one egg a day in the evenings, and I collected one last night, then found another egg this morning when I went to change out their food and water today. Tomorrow I shall be making myself unpopular with them because it will be time to change out their bedding. They've been doing well with the pine shavings I got them, but the bedding gets disgusting after a little while, so a full change is required. I am going to research the "deep litter" method when we move, since apparently that requires less regular cleaning out, and I hear it works well for poultry, especially in the winter.

I have D&D tonight after a long-ish hiatus, because we are all adults with lives and commitments, and scheduling is HARD. Since D&D is a basement activity for me (that's where the computer desk is), I will do my best to do some packing tonight too, since I'll be down there anyway. I ordered some pre-printed packing labels to help with identifying boxes, and I need to pick up some extra Sharpie pens and maybe figure out how to clearly identify what's in each box in a more efficient way than simply scribbling on the side in Sharpie. :P (Suggestions welcome, btw!)

I have reached out to two moving companies already for quotes, and am thinking I might try for one or two more. I want a quote for how much it would cost if we do all our own packing and for if I pay for someone else to do all the packing. I suspect the latter is going to be way too expensive, but it's worth asking, at least. I assume they'll want to do a walkthrough of the house to get an idea of just how much stuff there is (so much stuff), so I'm going to need to get the house tidied and semi-organized before they arrive. At least that should light a fire under me to get the ball rolling.

My goal this weekend is to get the entire basement packed up minus my computer desk, which I'm still going to need for the next few weeks. I'm also going to do a serious purge of my closet. There's a bunch of clothes I just don't wear anymore anyway, so I may as well donate the ones that are in good shape and toss the ones that can't be donated. Then I need to get rid of a bunch of the stuff that I don't need or use anymore, and pack up whatever I won't need for the next six weeks or so (books, old CDs, etc.). I'm going to ask KK to put one of our portable A/C units up for sale, since we're not using them anymore and the new place has central A/C. That will free up some space and put a tiny bit of money toward the move.

I think it's all doable, or at least I hope so.

Anyway, it will soon be time to go home, so I will catch you on the flip side, friends!

Tomorrow morning I have my appointment with the sleep specialist. I cannot emphasize enough how excited I am about this! The appointment is at 8:15 and they want me to arrive half an hour early, so I'll be leaving around 7:00 just to be on the safe side. I don't know what the traffic is like going there at that hour, and I don't want to be late. I hope that I'll be leaving with a prescription for a CPAP in hand, and it's my intention to get an appointment with a local provider I found ASAP. In fact, the plan is to call the minute I get out of the appointment and see how quickly I can get an appointment.

Have I mentioned that I am TIRED of constantly feeling like warmed-over crap?

Anyway, I am very excited about the appointment tomorrow. I hope it goes well. If it doesn't, I may very well cry. I wonder if I can get a same-day appointment. That would be ideal, but I'm not going to get my hopes up too high for that. I do hope I can get an appointment this week, though, and that they can accommodate a later time since I don't have a ton of time available to take off work. We shall see, I guess.

In unrelated news, the quail are still doing well. I changed out their food and water this morning, and once I'd closed the door behind me I heard some very loud and indignant tweedling. I initially shrugged it off, but the tweedling repeated as I went up the stairs, so I went back to investigate. I checked the quail's bin, and as I was puzzling over it I heard more loud and indignant tweedling and realized that one of the boys had managed to get out of the enclosure and was standing under the sink, making his displeasure known. I think he was mostly mad about being separated from his friends and girlfriends, or maybe he thought they'd make a break for freedom with him. Either way, I scooped him up and put him back, and he immediately settled down.

I now have four eggs! It's very exciting. I don't know which of the females is being such a good layer, but I am certainly not complaining. It might not be just one, either, but I have a completely unsubstantiated feeling that all the eggs are from one bird. I hope the other two get in on the action soon. Three small eggs a day is the equivalent of one normal chicken egg per day, which means a total of about five to seven eggs a week, if all the ladies lay regularly. I'm kind of excited for my first quail egg dish. I don't know if I should make a really simple omelette or if I should look up a recipe specific for quail eggs. I am tempted to at least do some research on that front. Quail eggs are considered a delicacy by many, after all.

I had my weekly Sunday Skype call with my parents. I tried to get them onto Zoom since Skype is disappearing in three weeks, but my mother especially is attached to Skype, so we're sticking with that to the bitter end, apparently. My mother is anxious about my move, and as usual her anxiety is translating into her getting super passive-aggressive and slightly nasty with me. This is not a trait I particularly enjoy, because among other things she tends to talk to me as though I am a developmentally disabled child who's playing with missile launchers. It particularly annoys me when she condescendingly explains to me that I will need to make a budget, and then tries to explain home maintenance to me while not knowing the difference between a septic holding tank, a propane tank, and a sump pump (literally the conversation we had today, no exaggeration).

Anyway, I have been dealing with my mother for 46 years now, and because I am an adult with good communication tools now and enough empathy to understand that it's my mother's rampant undiagnosed anxiety disorder causing her to act this way, I gently called her out on her behaviour and eventually redirected her energy to something more positive. She initially denied that she was being nasty, but eventually kind of grudgingly semi-admitted to it. The rest of the Skype call went much more smoothly after that, and she was in a much better mood by the time we ended the call.

I made a pseudo-roast chicken in the Instant Pot for dinner, and now I have leftovers for the week to go with my borscht, as well as rice, and a package of spicy lentil something-or-other that my friend Sarah gave to me last weekend. She's allergic to dairy and accidentally bough the packet even though it contains both butter and cream. Since it's spicy and has tomatoes KK won't touch it with a ten-foot pole, so that means I get to have it for lunch, which sounds delightful. KK tolerates lentils but only up to a point, so adding spice and tomatoes is literally a recipe for disaster.

I definitely need to step up my packing game this week. I've been feeling overwhelmed about things, so I think I will start in my bedroom instead of the living room, because it will (I HOPE, DEAR GOD) be easier to make decisions about de-cluttering and the like. I plan on significantly downsizing my wardrobe, which I've been meaning to do for a while anyway. I have a dresser and a night table that I need to empty, as well as my small library of reference books. I also need to get rid of my terrible broken air conditioning unit anyway, which should free up a fair bit of space for staging my boxes. I should probably consider paring down some of my linens, too. I need to let go of some of my prepper tendencies here and embrace some minimalism where it comes to my immediate possessions.

Okay. Time to get to bed so I won't accidentally oversleep tomorrow and miss my sleep appointment. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Everything is settled about the house purchase except for the infamous desktop appraisal, and of course everything hinges on that. If it doesn't come back in my favour that may scuttle my chances of purchasing the home entirely. Given how late it is today, I doubt I'll hear back before tomorrow. The deadline is tomorrow at the end of the day (either end of business or 8pm, my real estate agent couldn't remember which), but the external company isn't obligated to stick to my deadline, because it's more of a me problem than a them problem. My only role is to pay them money, it would seem, and keep my fingers crossed that they provide an answer in time (and really hope it works out in my favour).

So I just have to wait for another 24 hours. God, I hate waiting so much, especially for big things like this. I am really bad at uncertainty.

There was a mix-up at the hair salon with my online reservation for an appointment, so I will have to continue dealing with my hair looking like someone took a weed whacker to it for a few more weeks at least. Boo. I suppose it's not a bad thing, since I have spent most of my available money on house hunting stuff.

What they don't tell you when you're buying a house is just how many extra expenses there are before, during, and right after the purchase. There's a deposit for the house (not the same as a down payment) to provide along with an accepted offer, building inspectors, surprise desktop appraisals, then the actual purchase of the home, lawyers' fees, closing costs, moving costs, the welcome tax, and then a score of smaller costs as you try to fill in the gaps in equipment needed for the maintenance of your home.

Anyway, today was a reasonably productive day. I got up at a halfway reasonable hour in order to get out to a local feed store to get quail feed and suitable bedding in the form of pine chips. The quail are very happy with their new bedding, and are just as enthusiastic about the new food as they were about the old food, so it's hard to say if they like it the same or more. I also got them a small lamp with a bulb that mimics daylight, and KK pulled out an extra timer she had in her room, so now the quail can get a lot more light during the day, and a little bit of light even if I forget to turn on the main overhead light (or oversleep one day). I'm glad I have them settled in with more appropriate food: quail need more protein than you typically get in chicken layer feed, so I didn't want to keep them waiting longer than absolutely necessary. They are super cute, and a lot more active now that they've had a chance to settle in. I hope to get some eggs once all the stress they underwent for the auction and subsequent move to my house goes away.

In related news, I will require supervision the next time I go to Ritchie's Feed & Seed Garden Centre. There is everything there that an aspiring homesteader could want, including beginner bee hives! I just got the quail, so even if we do get the property I won't be adding any new livestock to the equation until I'm confident I can adequately care for the animals I have, even on a bad day. The bad days have to be my bar, not my good days, because even on a bad day all the animals will need to be fed and watered and potentially have their living spaces cleared out, so I have to be absolutely sure they won't be neglected. That being said, I have a long list of critters I'd like to get, supposing that we're able to purchase this property. Probably more than I would ever be able to manage, but my goodness I want them. XD

I am still spectacularly tired. I've had next to no break for two weeks now, because I scheduled the professional organizer in on all my days off last week, and then I had the bird auction and other sundries on Saturday, and yesterday of course was the mostly impromptu trip to Montreal. So I've had some very long and very busy days. The plan is to go to bed as early as possible tonight to try to get myself back on track, sleep-wise. I'm going to my follow-up appointment for the sleep study in exactly one week, which is pretty exciting. I am hopeful there will be better quality sleep and therefore more energy and better health really soon!

If the house purchase goes through (and it's anybody's guess at this point, because house valuations are 100% arbitrary), then I will be spending the rest of the week making a packing plan, getting some packing supplies, and starting the packing process. We'll only have 60 days to downsize a lot of stuff from the house (and I'm guessing it will be mostly my stuff because KK doesn't like parting from her things) and pack up the rest of it, and given KK's physical limitations I think it's a safe bet that I will be doing most of the downsizing and packing. I do plan on keeping all the receipts for moving supplies and asking her to chip in for about half, and I do expect her to do her own packing when it comes to her bedroom and her office space. I think it's only fair she do that if I'm going to be packing up the entire rest of the house.

Okay, that's it for today. Time to get myself to bed. Good night, friends!

I am nearly done. Creeping up on halfway through tonight’s night shift (and by the time I finish this post it may be past that time, depending on how often I get interrupted for work).