Corner of Bourbon & Division

I'm writing from the future! *ooOooOooh* *spooky future noises*

I was so exhausted after yesterday's packing session that I could barely string two words together. I had to have a guy come in and replace the water meter first, and that was a whole ordeal of trying to corral the dogs and run the water and supervise the guy while he was in my basement. He took longer than I thought he would, so I had to request that Brittany, the professional organizer, delay her start time by half an hour.

We cleared out a huge chunk of the garage yesterday. There was so much recycling and garbage, it was actually pretty shocking. I think a lot of stuff had just gotten tossed in there to be dealt with later and then just never got dealt with. Also KK has a tendency to squirrel away garbage and recycling in various unexpected containers and then not tell me about it, so that I get a garbage-y surprise when I open said container months (or in this case, years) later. None of it was perishable, luckily, so it was just a matter of getting rid of it.

Yesterday was garbage day, but we have a three-item limit for garbage pickup, otherwise you have to buy very expensive city-produced yellow garbage bags, and I did have some on hand, which I bought knowing we'd likely need them for the move. I had bought two packs of four, and we filled five bags, which are annoyingly difficult to tie, incidentally. There's also a bunch of larger things that wouldn't fit in a garbage can and therefore count as "large" items. Each "large" item counts against your three-item limit for pickup, and you can't arrange for extra pickup for those, so I will be taking all this stuff to the dump, probably on Friday. 

I thought there would be more packing involved with the garage, but it turned out that once I cleared out all the garbage and recycling, what was left was already mostly packed up or not the kind of thing to be boxed up anyway. So that was a bit of a relief. There's still some work to be done: I have to empty the small pantry and also empty and defrost the freezer, but that will be a job for next week, especially the freezer. The small pantry can be packed into a couple of boxes pretty easily.

I wanted to take a very hot shower after I was done, but KK left to go to the pharmacy and decided to run the dishwasher, which meant I couldn't take a shower until well after she was back. I must say, the hot water felt glorious after the day spent clearing out the garage. I collapsed into a puddle in my bed after dinner, and that was the end of it. I did remember that I should post an update, but I decided it wasn't worth losing more sleep, and that I would backdate an entry today once Brittany was gone, which is what I have done!

You know, if all that was required of me to be successful in life was making plans, I would be acing this whole "being a successful human" thing. I love making plans, the more detailed, the better. The problem, of course, is that to actually succeed at things, you have to enact said plans, and that is where everything kind of falls apart for me.

KK kind of falls into the same category as me, and we are pretty terrible about enabling each other at making plans and then following through on maybe 10% of them. To be fair, it's a lot of fun to make plans, and I don't mind too much if all the low-stakes, castles-in-Spain plans don't come to fruition. It's actually really fun to talk about these things and throw ideas back and forth and build it up in our imaginations. I don't know if she is quite as aware as I am that our reach might exceed our grasp in a lot of cases, but I suspect she is.

I am also well aware of my propensity to make grand plans to completely turn my life around while I'm working night shifts (I talked about in in a previous post a few weeks ago, during another round of night shifts), and I have just come to accept it as one of my brain's quirky little ways of generating dopamine, so I just let it happen now and try not to convince myself that this time will totally be different, no, really! As long as I can accept that this is just an exercise in making my brain go *brrrt*, and that I have no expectations of actually doing anything about it, then it's a harmless little pastime during slower night shifts.

Right now I am trying to make sensible plans for packing up the house next week. Working 12-hour shifts this weekend means I won't get anything done, and there is no sense in deluding myself into thinking that I will somehow manage to do anything other than sleep and go to work. My current ambitious plan is to try to get a lot of packing done on Monday, when normally I'd spend a chunk of the day sleeping after my night shift. Don't get me wrong, I will still sleep when I get home, but it will be more of a two-hour power nap and then I'll aim to go to bed very early as a way of shifting over my sleep schedule as quickly as possible.

Tuesday through Thursday I've hired the professional organizer I had hired back in... March? I think? *checks calendar* Nope, first week of April. ANYWAY. I have hired her to come for six hours a day to help me pack up the garage and, if there's enough time, the basement. I am reasonably confident that I can pack up the upstairs on my own (minus KK's room and bathroom), and if I have friends able and willing to help pack the kitchen and dining room, that will also be really helpful. I might be able to do it on my own, but only time will tell.

So far most of the coworkers I have asked for a shift switch have said no, which is sad but not unexpected. I have two coworkers left who might be able to help me out. One is coming in for a shift today, and the other won't be in until Monday, so if the first one says no I'll just have to log into my email account from home to see if the second is willing to take one for the team. He very well might, since I agreed to swap weekends with him back in November so he could take his wife to go see Taylor Swift in Toronto, but it will of course be dependent on whether he has other commitments lined up already. Getting the weekend off to pack would be ideal, but if I can't get it, I will cope.

I have set one boundary with regards to the packing with KK, and that's that I expect her to pack up her own shit. I am by far the more able-bodied of the two of us, so I don't mind that I'm probably going to end up packing up most of the house on my own. I need her to still be physically functional by the time moving day arrives, so I'm perfectly willing to take that on. What I am not willing to take on, however, is packing up her office or her bedroom or her bathroom. Those three rooms are all on her, and I told her that many weeks ago. Like me, she hasn't started packing yet, but I don't plan on bailing her out at the last minute. Whatever she hasn't packed is just going to get left behind, and she can figure out how to get it delivered to the house. The chances of her not being ready in time are not super high, but they're also not zero, either. But I can't be responsible for myself, the whole house, the pets, AND her stuff. So she gets to be responsible for that.

Somewhere in the next ten days I am going to lose at least half a day to attend the closing for the house. I haven't heard from the lawyer, come to think of it, so I'll shoot them an email to make sure everything is still good on that front, or if they need more information from me or something. Great. Another thing to be paranoid about. Well, at least it should be a relatively easy fix, and it's 10 days before my official closing date (and more than one business week), so hopefully there's nothing to worry about. Anyway, I assume the closing will be done at the lawyer's office in Cornwall, so I'll have to drive out there and back, and even if it takes an hour or less to sign all the paperwork, it means at least a three hour trip, possibly longer.

I think it's still doable, God help me. I may just be deluding myself, but I am an incurable optimist when it comes to these things. I guess we'll find out!

All right, time to close out this night shift. I have a little over two hours left before I can go home and get some sleep. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I didn't get a nap in before I had to go to work, and now I am extremely tired and my head hurts. My back also hurts, but that's because I changed out the quail enclosures and then wrangled cats and dogs to the vet, not because I didn't nap. I wish napping fixed back pain, honestly, it would make my life so much easier. I am very sad that I didn't get to nap. I feel like a nap would have made everything a lot more tolerable.

I didn't get any packing done, either. I know: surprise, surprise. I am my own worst enemy these days. Even if I get some packing done this week while I'm on night shifts, I'm definitely going to have to rely on adrenaline-fueled panic in the two weeks before we move. I think I can get it done, but it's going to be a stressful time, for sure.

I am still torn about whether or not to bring some of my furniture with me. I think there simply isn't enough room for most of my bedroom furniture, even with a Murphy bed installed. Part of me wants to bring it anyway and store it in the garage, because eventually I want to tear down the garage (the home inspector said it will need to come down in a few years no matter what) and build what would essentially be an extension to the house. More to the point, I want to build out some extra independent living space just in case one or both of my parents ends up needing to come live with us. So I was thinking an extra bedroom or two, a bathroom, and either a kitchenette or a kitchen, depending on space and how much it would all cost. I obviously don't have the money now (especially not now that my cats need dental surgery), but I am being given a HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) to accompany the house, and I might be able to use it for the construction costs. I definitely can't afford to build an entire new house, but something simple might well be doable. I'll have to look into what permits I'd need and what is and isn't allowed on the property, of course, but I like this plan. Of course, we all know what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men...

Speaking of the cats' dental surgery, I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going to have to switch all the cats over to wet food, at least in part. The vet said he wouldn't make recommendations for food until after the surgery, since we don't know how many teeth are going to need to come out, but even so, adding wet food is probably a good idea. Of course, that is going to be wildly expensive, so I am thinking of starting some rabbit breeding ahead of schedule (I was going to start next year) and use the meat and organs as a base to make my own raw/wet food for the cats. I'll have to consult with my vet to see how complicated the nutrition aspect is for cats (I have heard horror stories about people feeding their pets inadequate "raw food" diets) so that I don't accidentally deprive them of essential nutrients.

I feel like I had more I wanted to post about, but my brain is kind of mush right now, so I guess I'll call it here and hope I remember whatever it was later on today.

Catch you on the flip side, folks!

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'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!

The quail laid their first egg today. I am very excited! The first egg is always the most exciting. I expected the quail to need at least two weeks to de-stress and feel comfortable enough to lay, but here we are, four days later, with our first egg! Quail eggs are so pretty, I love the speckling. I will put it carefully in an egg carton and wait for more eggs to appear now (it might take a while). It's about three quail eggs to make the equivalent of one chicken egg, so it's going to take a minute for me to have enough eggs to do anything meaningful. Once we've moved I'm going to buy an incubator and hopefully hatch out more quail, and I may look around for local suppliers to get different genetic material into the breeding pool, just to be on the safe side.

I am going to have to be careful about how much money I spend on the chicken math. ;) This move is going to be incredibly expensive (dear God, the lawyer's fees and land transfer tax ALONE make me want to weep), not to mention I need to get some furniture and equipment to maintain the property. I bought some packing supplies today, and of course things have gone up in price thanks to recent economic shenanigans. I remember when I bought my house in 2011 that it felt like I was hemorrhaging money the first 12 to 18 months of owning that house, and I suspect this will be no different, and probably worse, given how much more property there is and how much more there is to do. *sigh* Being an adult is HARD.

I spent most of today being useless with a migraine, which checks out. I don't get migraines often anymore, but they've always had a tendency to hit hardest right after a period of stress, once I've let my guard down. Once I was sufficiently recovered I pulled the beets out of the vegetable crisper and made borscht. The recipe makes a truly industrial quantity of the stuff, which is too bad because KK won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, and that means I am going to be eating borscht for the next week. XD I'm not too mad about it, but it would make life so much simpler if KK ate more "peasant" foods, not to mention how much cheaper it would be to feed the two of us. I'm hoping 

All righty. It's time to take myself to bed. 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!

Two days ago marked the third anniversary of the day I moved into this house. Now, in a little over two weeks, I'll be moving into the little house I rented in Ottawa, right near work. Whatever little money I make off the sale of this house is going to go into a savings account, and I'll be adding to it for the next couple of years so that I can once again afford a down payment on a real, owned-by-me house.

I'm going to miss this house. It was (and is) my first, and I love it a lot. It's really big for just one person, with lots of natural light and beautiful hardwood floors. I love my neighbours and the quiet neighbourhood, and the dog park that's a two minute walk away. I'm going to miss the space, the quiet, the security of owning my own home. If I could just uproot the house (and maybe the neighbours, too) and take it with me, I would likely do that. Alas.

It's a move for the better. I'll be close to work, and won't exhaust myself commuting 600km a week or more. I'll save on gas by being able to walk to work most days. The rent on the house will be less than what I was paying on the mortgage and renting the little room in Ottawa, too. Not to mention that the room I was renting was in Nepea'n, which made for terribly long commutes through rush hour traffic in the evenings. All in all, I'll likely end up saving a couple hundred dollars a month, which does add up.

In the meantime, I'm kind of feeling the financial pinch. Don't get me wrong, I have good problems. I have problems other people would kill to have. Nonetheless, my finances this past year have been stretched incredibly thin, when in reality I shouldn't be having this much trouble making ends meet. So starting in December, when I'll be moved and settled, I'm going to start a regime of personal financial austerity that's going to make the Europoean fiscal practices of the past few years feel downright spendthrifty. :P

Okay, maybe not quite that bad. But I still have a good nine months of pretty stiff expenses ahead of me. The big expense after rent is the car payments, which will be over in May, and the daycare payments, which will end in June. After that, the money that was going to those two things is going to get funnelled directly into paying off the debt I accrued in the last year doing house renovations and travelling back and forth to a different city. My hope is to get almost all of the debt paid off within about 12 months, and still put money aside for a down payment on a house in about two years or so.

In the interim, I'll be using thinkingoutlaw's book to help me be thriftier in the kitchen. Have you all seen it yet? It's pretty great, and on Amazon for a very reasonable price! Even if you don't have an e-reader. Well worth the read, if you're looking to spend less on food yet still eat delicious, healthy things.

For now, I'm trying to focus on packing up my house. It's going very slowly so far, but I hope to pick up the pace in the coming days. Since the movers are paid by the hour, I'll need to make sure that I "waste" as little of their time as possible. The plan is to put as much of my furniture as possible together in one room (probably the space I use as a dining room), and to stack all the boxes together in the living room. I don't want the movers having to trot in and out of various rooms in the house if they don't have to. That way the only extra movements they'll have to make will be to fetch the appliances from the basement and the glass table I have on my balcony, which I don't think I'll be able to move on my own to the front of the house. I can at least move the chairs, though. The hope is that, if I consolidate everything, it won't take them three hours to pack up the house. I'm already looking at about five hours of travel time, so I need to keep the loading/unloading time to a minimum.

I also need to deal with a million details. Cancel the house insurance, acquire rental insurance, switch over the insurance on the car, change my address with Canada Post, cancel the utilities, all that jazz. So much to do, so little time.

I will come back with other updates later. There are lots of things happening, but they don't belong in this entry.