Corner of Bourbon & Division

I feel like today was a bit of a wash. I was the Greeter at Meeting online today, but someone in the Meeting House (the same person who is constantly complaining about the "technology" in the Meeting House) took it upon herself to, as another Friend put it, "cosplay as Ministry & Counsel." I am trying and failing to not be annoyed by it. It honestly doesn't matter who says the things as long as the Meeting unfolds the way it should, and it did, but I have a red trigger button that revolves around people thinking I'm incompetent/can't do my job or telling me how to do my job, and apparently this hit the same button. In conclusion, I am MIFFED.

Otherwise I packed more boxes in the basement, which took more time than I anticipated. What's left in the basement is all stuff that's weirdly shaped or a bit too big to fit in most boxes, and a lot of it is really random shit that belongs to KK that I can't even identify, which makes labelling the boxes a bit of a challenge. Still, I made some headway, which is something.

KK is spending tonight at her friend H's hotel again, and so I have to medicate Rika the Chihuahua and feed Libby (the long-haired tabby) her special kidney food on top of the regular bedtime routine stuff. I'll be doing that in a few minutes, as soon as I've put the quail to bed.

I have also, because I am a special kind of crazy, applied to adopt a senior Brittany from a rescue group. His name is Odin, and he's 10 years old, and he looks like an absolute sweetheart, albeit with the same escape artist and counter surfing tendencies as my current set of hooligans. So, you know, he'll fit right in! Of course, there's no guarantee my application will be accepted. Rescues are notoriously finicky about placing animals, so they may find something wrong with either the new house, the new property, or my general attitude and philosophy with regards to owning dogs and the care and treatment thereof. I don't have a fence yet, although we do definitely plan on building a six-foot fence to keep the current set of hooligans from haring off and terrorizing our neighbour's dairy cows. I don't want to constantly be worried that my dogs are being a nuisance to the neighbours. Anyway, we shall see.

Now, I am off to medicate the dog, feed the cat, take a quick shower, and then lapse into a hopefully at least slightly restorative slumber. I don't recall if I mentioned it, but last week I fell asleep one night before putting on my CPAP mask, and I felt like absolute garbage the next day. So while I hadn't noticed the night-and-day difference in energy levels that other people have said come with using a CPAP, I can report with full confidence that it is, in fact, doing something.

I really do not like being the SitRep writer at work. It's so much more work than just doing my regular job, and none of it can be done on "autopilot" the way a lot of my regular work can. I have one more day left of this role, and next week I can go back to my little routine and be left alone. Thank goodness.

I could complain more about moving, but I won't. :P

I am not usually a True Crime Girlie, as the youths call it these days, but last year I fell down a very specific rabbit hole in the form of the Karen Read murder case. It's being covered on YouTube by (well, by a million people approximately) a lawyer from Alberta that I started following for a completely unrelated reason, and the whole case is absolutely wild. Like, if it was written as a novel or as an episode of a police procedural you would dismiss it as being too unrealistic. I've had the videos on in the background rather like a podcast, and it has very much helped speed the days along lately. I have reached the end of the videos for now, but the trial is still going on, so I assume there will be more videos. I like the YouTuber I follow for several reasons, but most of all I love the name he picked for himself: Runkle of the Bailey. His actual name is Ian Runkle, and of course it's a nod to Rumpole of the Bailey, which was a favourite of mine when I was growing up. I think he leans far more conservative than I do, but I appreciate his legal analysis and breakdown of what's been going on in the trial.

It is weird to be following a "true crime" case. I was more interested in these things when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but I have grown to mostly find consuming these stories to be distasteful and weirdly prurient. I think it's because this case isn't so much about the horrible thing that happened to the victim, but rather the elaborate "conspiracy" and the extraordinary incompetence and corruption of the police force(s) involved in the case. We are likely never going to know what happened, because the facts have been so thoroughly obfuscated, but on that basis alone it seems to me that the accused, Karen Read, should be acquitted simply due to lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I have my own idea of what may have plausibly happened, but I am watching from Canada and the incident took place in Massachusetts in 2022, so my idea is basically fiction carefully woven around what few "facts" I have picked up from watching YouTube videos, so it is worth precisely nothing. I just like making up stories to help the world make sense, and I have no illusion that I have any great insight into what "really" happened. The only thing I know for sure is that it is a tragedy that has left two kids twice orphaned, and has ruined the life of a young woman who is already struggling with several chronic health conditions. Everything about this case is terrible.

So, yeah, that's been my mental escape for the past few days. I will have to find something else to keep me distracted until new videos get uploaded. 

As of tomorrow after work I will be on my own for the foreseeable future, since KK will be going to pick up H at the airport, and I assume they'll be going directly to H's hotel after that, leaving me alone with the dogs. I am planning to take advantage of her absence to get as much shit done as I can. I actually find it difficult to get chores done when KK is home, because I always feel as though I'm bothering her or in her way or both. With her gone I will hopefully be able to get a bunch more packing done, and I might also bring the dogs to the dog park after work so they can get some of the crazies out.

If I buckle down hard I might be able to get my bedroom completely packed except for the stuff I immediately need for the next two-ish weeks, which will free me up to pack up the basement and the cat room over the weekend. I have rented another U-Haul van (I wanted to rent a pick-up truck, but apparently they don't have those anymore in Ottawa) so that I can take a bunch of stuff to the local dump on Saturday. KK had agreed to help me with this, but I get the feeling she won't be early enough on Saturday to really help with anything. Still, it will be good to get all this garbage out of the house. I have reserved the van for six hours starting at 07:00, and I think that should be plenty of time to get everything loaded up and brought to the dump. That will clear out enough space for me to keep packing without tripping over even more stuff.

In other news, it looks like I may run out of feed for the quail before we move, which is really unfortunate. I really didn't want to have to schlep a large quantity of feed with me the whole way when we finally do move. It's very heavy and therefore very inconvenient. Alas.

Okay. Time for bed.

Well, last week was certainly a fucking gong show.

For a second I thought we were going to make it, albeit highly imperfectly. I had managed to pack up the whole garage, most of the basement and the entire main floor (the latter thanks to the help from our friends), and I was willing to just leave the "cat room" to be a problem for future me, since it just contains mostly books and bookcases. I quite simply ran out of time, even with help, to pack up the house, and I was willing to take that one on the chin and figure it out later.

But then Friday morning came and KK was too sick to move. She was dizzy and seeing double as a result of overextending herself (her words), and couldn't even stand up. I had gone to bed around midnight and had gotten up around 3:30 in order to keep packing and to get the dogs to PetSmart for the day, so I found this out when I got home around 7:30. I mentally debated my options, since KK hadn't even come close to finishing up with packing her room and had decided to ask the movers to finish up her packing for her (which was NOT our initial agreement!), and I decided it was better to just cancel the whole thing and try again. Our moving plan involved her driving the cats and a lot of the food in her car to the new place, so if she was too dizzy to stand, she was obviously in no condition to drive.

I had to pay a cancellation fee, of course, and the moving company was rather put out, but they agreed to reschedule for June 18th. I paid another months' rent, made sure our utilities wouldn't be shut off, and then went to pick up the dogs from PetSmart. We'd moved a bunch of loose stuff (garden equipment, plants, etc.) on Thursday, including the fruit flies that we use to feed the dart frogs, so I had to drive out to the new place to retrieve the bugs so the frogs wouldn't starve. I figured it would be a fun time for the dogs if I brought them with me and allowed them to run around the property and get some of the excess energy out of their systems, and I was absolutely right: they had a BLAST. They zoomed around every single inch of the four acres, found the pond (which I discovered is pretty much completely dried up) and rolled around in some delicious mud and pond scum, and came out reeking of said pond scum. They were thrilled, and slept hard in the car the entire way home.

In the meantime, all the kitchen stuff is packed, so I went to the dollar store yesterday and picked up some cheap dishes and a cheap pot, pan, and a couple of mugs, and some kitchen utensils just to see us through the next two weeks. I am sad to report the dishes did not last a day, because KK accidentally knocked them onto the floor and broke one of the two plates I bought. I have informed her that I am not buying more. If she wants dishes she can fucking buy them herself at this point. This move is already wildly expensive, and I'm having to shoulder the financial burden of the extra month in this house. If she's going to break the shit I just bought, even if it's an accident (and I'm sure it was), she can fucking well replace it. I suspect this just means I'm going to find that plate constantly used and in the sink for me to wash, but whatever, I will take that up with her when it happens. We're pretty much going to be living off frozen dinners and easy to eat/no preparation required foods until we move. I don't particularly have the wherewithal to cook, all my spices, pots, pans, oils, etc. are completely packed, and I refuse to unpack and repack the kitchen. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

I am trying very hard not to be mad at KK for the things that aren't in her control, but I am annoyed at her for the things that are in her control. She literally only had to pack up her bedroom, bathroom, office, and her china cabinet, while I took on the rest of the house, and she didn't even get that done. Her bathroom is untouched and her bedroom is only halfway packed. Yes, while our friends were here she stayed downstairs and helped with boxes, but she honestly could have used that time to go upstairs and work on her stuff. The main reason she didn't was because it was hot upstairs (we don't have air conditioning), and I will confess that I have less sympathy than usual for that. I did have help with my part of the house and I also ran out of time, but in my defense I worked for two and a half weeks straight after having Covid and after an emergency trip to Montreal to care for my sick parents, so I think maybe I am allowed a tiny bit of slack, here. KK also had Covid, so I totally get that that time was a write-off, but she had all the time before that, the weekends when I was working and she wasn't, and a fair bit more time in general than I did, with a much smaller workload. How hard would it have been to try to pack one box a day in her bedroom? *bangs head on desk*

I really, really hope she doesn't plan on pulling the same bullshit for the next two weeks. If she does, we are going to have fucking words about it, and I am not confident in my ability to keep a civil tongue in my head about it.

At least we were able to dig out our work equipment, so we'll be able to work for the next couple of weeks. I'm scheduled for day shifts this week and next week, and there is some work from home time for me, so I need to have my work computer all set up, which I did today. So at least that part is set and organized.

I have ordered the Murphy bed for the new place, and unfortunately it seems like I don't get to have any control over the delivery date and time, and it seems like they might not even deliver into the house, but are just going to dump it in my driveway? Which honestly seems kind of shitty to me, especially since they only mentioned that AFTER I had ordered and paid for it. Argh. I will have to keep an eye on the tracking number so that I can figure out how to be at the house on the delivery date in order to accept said delivery, and maybe bat my eyelashes at the delivery guy(s) to at least put the boxes inside my house.

Okay. It's time for me to go to bed. I have a slightly later start at work tomorrow, thank goodness. This week I am what's called the SitRep writer, meaning it's my job to collate information about ongoing and emergent events, like wildfires and flooding and other stuff, write up a Situation Report (or SitRep) and send that out for approval before the end of the day. Since the reports start rolling in a bit later in the day, my schedule gets shifted up accordingly, and it means I can take my time getting ready for work tomorrow morning. What I think I will try to do is get up at the usual time and take the dogs out to the dog park for a long run so that they will be nice and tired and calm for the rest of the day.

That's it for me for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

What the subject line says: 0/10, do not recommend.

We are 36 hours away from moving time, and we are still nowhere near ready, although we have made a lot of progress, thanks in great part to our friends who helped us to pack yesterday and today. Two of the three came back today, and between the four of us we got the main floor almost completely packed.

I have realized a few things during this process

1- Very few people know how to pack properly for a move.
2- KK is fucking terrible at packing.
3- KK has a very different definition of "finished" than I do. 

KK had the bright idea to pack up some of the packing supplies over the weekend, specifically the box cutters and markers, so that there was only one box cutter and one marker for the entire house. I may have lost my shit at her just a little bit when I found this out yesterday. I have no idea what she was thinking, and honestly neither does she. I also had to give her instructions on how to label boxes when I found that she had labelled all of the boxes she'd packed "desk stuff." Now, I don't care what she labels her own stuff, but I wasn't about to put up with poorly labelled boxes that we all know I am going to have to unpack.

I am grateful that she stayed to help pack up the downstairs, but she is very far behind on packing up her bedroom, as am I. At one point today she looked around the living room and declared us finished, and my jaw just about hit the floor, because there was loose stuff everywhere--at least three boxes' worth. I have no idea why she thought we were finished when we very clearly weren't.

Also, bless her socks, she is CONSTANTLY interrupting me when I'm packing, or when I'm doing anything at all. I can't get through a single box without her asking me to fetch her something or do something or answer a question, and it's driving me CRAZY. I have a hard enough time keeping my thoughts together without constant interruptions, and my patience has worn so thin that it is basically nonexistent so it's taking every ounce of my willpower not to constantly snap at her. She has a real knack for interrupting me right as I'm getting into a state of flow, too. I know that a huge part of this is just that I am very tired and very stressed, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't mind this nearly as much. Right now, though, it feels like trying to pack up the entire house with a very demanding pre-teen: old enough to be helpful, not old enough to do anything truly independently. She's also going through ALL of the boxes we bought to pack up both our bedrooms. I thought she was going to do a bit of a triage of her clothes and not keep everything, but apparently I was wrong. She is keeping it all, and God only knows where she thinks it's all going to fit. So tomorrow I will have to buy more boxes for my bedroom, because there will be none left.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of stuff to pack up in the basement, the entire cat room (books, office supplies, etc.), and my bedroom and bathroom. Tomorrow morning we're grabbing a small truck from U-Haul to bring as much stuff over there as possible that would be too fiddly or time-consuming for the movers to move on their own.

The plan is then for KK to stay at the house and wait for the internet service provider to come, and I just had a horrifying realization that we may not have electricity at the new house if the previous owners shut off their account the minute they moved. I completely forgot to contact the local electrical company to set up an account for us, so I just did that online, but it's very unlikely they will hook us up tomorrow. Fuck. At least we have a gas generator so we can at least power the fridge and freezers while we're there, but it's going to suck if we don't have electricity for however long it takes for us to get connected.

I am exhausted. I've been responsible for 90% of this move by default: switching all the service providers, dealing with all the mortgage paperwork, buying most of the packing supplies, making arrangements for the packing, and my brain isn't good for juggling that much information even on a good day, let alone after the past six weeks of hospitalized parents, Covid, night shifts at work, and everything else.

*pauses journal entry to go make a service request online*

Okay. I will ask KK to call them tomorrow while she's waiting at the house for the internet provider and see if they can rush the connection request. They already service the address, so hopefully it just means flipping a switch long-distance and doesn't require a technician come out. 

I want to go to bed because I can barely see straight, but if I do that instead of packing up the basement I don't know if I'll be able to get everything done. Fuckity fucking fuck.

In other news, Octavia and Juno had their dental surgery today, and it went very well and was very expensive. They are both tired but doing well and have already had food and the first dose of their antibiotics for the next four days.

Okay. Time to go feed and water the quail, and then, I don't know, I may go to bed and force myself to get up way earlier than I want to in order to get some packing done before I go to U-Haul. I didn't manage to get up early enough today, but tomorrow the panic may set in and help with getting up early, I don't know. Mostly I can't see straight, and I don't know that I have it in me to pack another box tonight.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

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!

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!