mousme | Entries tagged with planning

1-State of the Phnee

Today was very light on the sleep and very heavy on the Quaker. To quote one of my favourite TikTokers: “I shall explain.” (Seriously, if you are on TikTok, check out Philogène, she is hilarious!)

I think I mentioned that I had to sacrifice some sleep today because of the Worship Sharing on Health Concerns. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal, but boy howdy was I wrong about that! We were plagued by the weirdest tech problems I have ever experienced using Zoom. I started out by clicking the new link the organizer had sent just last night, and it didn’t connect, but kept showing a message that it was “waiting for the host to connect.” Now, I knew this couldn’t be right because the host/organizer has set up this meeting to not have a lobby/waiting room. I exited the meeting and went back to the original link that had been sent out a few days ago (identical to the one I clicked, I might add!) and immediately found myself in the meeting with two other people, but with no sign of my co-hosts, which was very weird as it was now a few minutes past the hour.

Before I could figure out what had gone wrong, though, I had to go into de-escalation mode with one of the attenders. She is one of the main reasons we started this worship sharing circle, because she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s sometime last year (if memory serves). She had been worried when no organizers were there when the meeting started and then struggled with the mute function and promptly burst into tears because she was so flustered and upset. We worked through it, but it was pretty distressing to have her become upset by the very thing which we hoped would be helpful. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, folks, even in the very early stages.

I got hold of the host by phone, and she was in a state because her internet had gone down, and then once it was running again Zoom insisted on updating, making her very late to her own meeting. That was when she told me that she and the other host were in another meeting with three attenders because they couldn’t get the first link to work at first. I have no idea how that’s even possible, but here we are. She agreed to bring everyone over because I didn’t want to force the attender with Alzheimer’s who was already super upset to have to log off our meeting and then log onto another one, but a few minutes later she texted to say they couldn’t do it and so we were going to simply have separate meetings. Oof.

Things actually went well after that. The two attenders and I had a quiet, intimate conversation about the challenges they were facing, and I talked a little bit about the challenges we’ve been having due to KK’s increasing levels of disability, as well as the frustrations I’ve been having at work trying to get a very simple accommodation (I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here before, but basically I have nerve damage in my spine from 2022 and I need a functional headset to do my job. One of the workstations at work has a phone which cannot take a headset because the jack is broken, and I’ve been asking them to replace it for nearly a year with no apparent progress.). It was a really nice conversation. The other attender is a really nice lady, but she is VERY ADHD and kept talking long past when the attender with Alzheimer's had mentioned she was tired and wanted to stop, so I stepped in after about five minutes when she asked yet another question and firmly but gently told her we were going to stop and have a few moments of worshipful silence. And THEN, bless her heart, she KEPT TALKING during the silence about how great silence was and how much she needed it. *facepalm* She is a sweet lady, but my God, the irony.

Once we were done, instead of being able to go back to bed, I then had to debrief with the other two hosts, because of course we weren’t privy to the contents of each other’s meetings. That debrief took another hour, so it was nearly 1pm by the time I was able to go back to sleep.

On the one hand, I am lamenting my lack of sleep, but on the other I am glad that I did choose to go, because otherwise who knows how upset that first attender would have been when no one showed up to talk to her? And my co-hosts and I were able to talk through some solutions for next time. We’ll be implementing some best practices moving forward so that we have some redundancies in place.

I’ve been working on Quaker stuff on and off since I got to work, too (when not dealing with actual work, that is). I’ve realized now that I’m the clerk of Ministry & Counsel that I really need to step up my game. I’ve been sort of coasting in a more advisory role for the past two years but now is not the time to be indecisive about things. The first thing I’m going to work on is our organization and communication. I decided after some deliberation and discernment with the other members of M&C to create a dedicated Gmail account for us. Originally, I thought this would be useful in preventing Members and Attenders from Ottawa Meeting from constantly bombarding only one member of M&C (who is a registered therapist) for advice and services. This way most of the requests will come to all of us, rather than just her. Now, however, I think it will serve a much more vital role. I’m going to use the calendar function to schedule all of our monthly meetings, as well as to handle the Greeter schedule on Sundays (we need an online Greeter and an in-person Greeter every time), and also all of our worship sharing sessions, Claremont Dialogues, and whatever else comes up. I’ve also created a bunch of folders in our Google Drive for agendas, meeting minutes, and reference documents. I don’t know how much the other members of M&C will use it (all of them are in their seventies and eighties), but at the very least it will allow me to track and share things more easily.

I’ve also sent out a bunch of emails from the new account to try to wrangle all the cats that have gotten loose in the past week or so. Here’s hoping I can get all my ducks in a row on this front. I want M&C to start being more active and present in the Meeting, because I get the feeling that we’ve been at a bit of a remove for years (long before any of the current members were there, for that matter) and many younger attenders at Meeting have no idea who we are or what we do. I’m going to reach out to the clerk of Adult Education and Outreach (I hope it’s the person I think it is—I will have to double check) to talk to them about the possibility of hosting a series of Ministry & Counsel 101 sessions: basically very short sessions, probably online, when people can come online, listen to a 5-10 minute presentation on a specific topic that M&C deals with, and then ask us questions if they have any.

I still need to write queries for our Claremont Dialogue about using technology/hosting hybrid meetings. I have a bit of writer’s block because I know that I’m super biased on the pro-tech/hybrid meeting side of things, and I want to write queries that will allow everyone to express their opinions but also encourage them to be nuanced and discerning when they do express said opinions. Being a spiritual leader is hard, yo!

In completely unrelated news, I’ve continued listening to Persepolis Rising and am happy to report that my favourite character is not dead and is just much older and even crankier than before. I am overjoyed. ;)

2-State of the smallholding

The kitchen sink appears to be stopped up again, which I only noticed just as I needed to leave for work. I can only hope that KK doesn’t somehow make it worse the way she did last time. I’m not sure where my plunger is, but I will try to locate it and maybe go to Canadian Tire to get a proper plumbing snake on my way home. I’m working an hour of OT this morning anyway for a coworker who has a medical appointment, and then I need to stop for gas, and there’s a Canadian Tire right next to the Costco where I’ll be getting gas for the car anyway.

I need to get over my weird psychological aversion to finishing up the tidying/cleaning/organizing of the main space in the house. Like, yes, sure, it’s all overwhelming and A Lot, but if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done, and I am the only one it bothers, so obviously if I want it fixed, I need to fix it myself. Part of it is that I am resentful at having to do it by myself when I am not responsible for a significant portion of the disaster. I do realize that this is kindergartener reasoning: “It’s not my mess! So-and-so made the mess, it’s not fair that I need to clean it!” No, Phnee, you live in a communal household, so communal chores are communal. Even though I don’t have an official autism diagnosis, I suspect that this falls under the rigid thinking/strong sense of “justice” criteria as well. Having a strong sense of justice often gets mistaken for a person being more moral or ethical or just than other people, but that’s a misconception: it’s an internal sense of justice, based entirely on values that you pick up from your family, community, and immediate surroundings. Much the same way a toddler will stomp their feet and complain it’s not “fair” that they have to go to bed when older people “get” to stay up late. So, yes, I think that’s probably a chunk of what’s happening, here. The other part is that I just hate cleaning because it’s hot and painful and time-consuming and mind-numbingly boring, regardless of whether I listen to music or a podcast or an audiobook, or whatever else to distract me.

I’m not really going to have much time to do any of said cleaning until next Monday, after all that. Today I have my follow-up appointment with the bariatric clinic, tomorrow I will need to carve out some time for grocery shopping, Saturday there is the “threshing session” that I mentioned the other day, and on Sunday we still don’t have an online Greeter for Meeting, and then we have the worship sharing session for the State of Society Report, followed by the Continuing Meeting of Ministry & Counsel for all the M&C folks across Canada. All of this means that I am going to be absolutely *fried*, and that attempting to do anything other than very light cleaning is going to end in tears, either metaphorical or real.

Next week, however, I have several days off, and even though I have a couple of commitments I mostly have a fair bit of time to schedule as I please.

3-State of the news

Well, François Legault has resigned, sort of unexpectedly and sort of not. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) has had a horrible year full of scandals, resignations, and horrifying budgets. They’re currently in a neck-and-neck race for last place in the polls. He has no clear successor, and they’re staring down the barrel of an election in the fall. It looks like the Parti Québécois may be poised to form the next government unless something huge happens between now and the elections.

In international news, all eyes are still focused on Iran and Greenland. There are ICE agents moving into multiple cities and states in the US, terrorizing the citizens and violating the constitution right, left and center. The silver lining is all the videos that have been posted online of ICE agents who don’t understand winter slipping and falling on their asses on the ice-slick streets. ICE defeated by ice. The irony is delicious.

Canada is looking at a 2.3% increase in dairy prices starting on February 1st. Ugh. It’s not a huge increase, of course, from an individual standpoint, but having dairy go up while all other prices are skyrocketing feels like an extra kick in the teeth.

In happier space news, a Canadian astronaut is heading to the moon this April, as part of NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years! This is very exciting. His name is Col. Jeremy Hansen, and he’s part of the Artemis II mission. Slightly disappointingly they will be orbiting the moon only and not landing, but still, it’s pretty freaking exciting. I hope they livestream the launch so people can watch. Yay, moon!

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: thoughtful

1-State of the Phnee

I got called in for overtime tonight, as I mentioned in my previous post. The OT money is nice (albeit not as much as it could be since it’s “only” an extra four hours this week), so I will take what I can, when I can, especially since I might be unemployed come April. Every little bit of extra money helps, after all. (I’m totally not stressed about being unemployed. Nope. Totally fine, nothing to see here, move along.)

The supervisor on duty made a bit of an oopsie with the OT today, which is hilarious but also a little annoying. I am the “early” shift tonight, which means my shift partner arrives at midnight and I come in an hour before. I was asked to come in at 8:00pm to cover a few hours, but they forgot or didn’t notice that the person who was working evenings was ALSO the early shift, and therefore scheduled to leave at 11:00pm, leaving me alone for an hour with only a trainee as backup. OOPS. We are risk-managing the situation, because it would have meant approving another hour of OT otherwise, because it’s impractical to ask someone to come in to cover that one hour, since it would take them longer than an hour to even get to work. Yay risk management! /o\

Luckily tonight hasn’t been too busy, and weirdly enough this same situation happened to me at the RCMP AND we happened to have a proper crisis happen when I was alone with a trainee. I handled it like a fucking champ at the time, and I actually had a lot of fun (it was the kind of “crisis” where no one got hurt and no one’s life was immediately at risk, which is the best kind of crisis to have!). Whenever I go to job interviews, it’s my go-to answer for the almost universal question of “Tell us about a time when you had to manage a stressful situation at work!” and it never fails to impress people. :)

Other than that, there’s not a ton to report. I did find a suspicious rusty looking stain on my shower floor today, which makes me think either Octavia or Juno might have a urinary tract infection. I really hope not, but cats hide illnesses super well, and Juno hasn’t been gaining much weight back since her dental surgery at the end of last May, unlike Octavia who has filled out again nicely. So I bought some hydrophobic sand/cat litter and a couple of urine sample collection kits and my cunning plan is to sequester each cat separately to see whether I find bloody urine (KK tells me she’s found diarrhea in the litter boxes, but it’s impossible to tell who from) or anything else, and then once I have identified the victim I will call our local vet to schedule an appointment and bring a urine and/or stool sample with me. Ah, the glamorous life of a pet owner.

I keep swearing to myself that I will stop burning the candle at both ends during my night shift weeks, and then life keeps throwing responsibilities at me. It’s very annoying. So in spite of my best efforts, I will be sacrificing my sleep for several days this week. Tomorrow afternoon I have meeting with another member of M&C to discuss a workshop we both went to on resolving conflicts in Meetings, and we’ll be preparing a report to present first to M&C and then to Ottawa Monthly Meeting if there is interest there. Then on Wednesday at 10:00am we have a Worship Sharing for Health concerns, which is a fancy Quaker name for a support group for people dealing with both acute and chronic illnesses, as well as people who are caretakers for ill and disabled people. But since I’ll be getting home around 8:00am it means I’ll get maybe an hour of sleep before I have to attend, and then go back to sleep afterward, which makes for a pretty broken “night.”

Then on Thursday at 11:00am I have my three-month follow-up after my bariatric surgery (thank goodness it’s a virtual appointment, at least!). It’s the whole reason I went to get blood tests done on Saturday. I already got my results back, and my hemoglobin, MCH and RDW are all out of whack (albeit only marginally so), meaning I am probably back to being slightly anemic. *sigh* I’ve always struggled with my iron levels, and I knew this was a risk with the surgery. Boo. I will chat with the nurse practitioner on Thursday about what to do about this. I also have slightly elevated ALT (2 U/L higher than normal), which the internet tells me is potentially a sign of liver cell damage like fatty liver disease. Unfortunately, the internet’s solutions are to drink less alcohol (I already don’t drink anymore and haven’t in a year, and before that I could count on my fingers the number of drinks I had in a year), to eat more fruit and vegetables (yes, already doing that) stop taking OTC pain meds like acetaminophen (I haven’t had any in, like, two months), drink coffee (I’m not really supposed to drink much coffee now due to the risk of ulcers), and consume more folic acid. I will check with the nurse practitioner about that too, I guess. Stupid body, I am TRYING to take better care of it, and this is how it repays me! :P

Speaking of trying to take better care of my body, I got in another workout today using FitBod. The app is hilariously optimistic about how much weight it thinks I should be able to manage with my noodle arms. 15 to 18lbs for each exercise, whereas I can barely manage 10 right now. Luckily it allows me to modify the weights in the exercise, so I can track my progress a little better. I think I will be happy if I can progress to the prescribed weights by the end of the month. My hope is that by the end of the year I will be using the maximum amount of weight allowed by the locking dumbbells I bought a couple of weeks ago (which is 50lbs, for those of you following along at home). I think that’s a pretty reasonable goal over 12 months. I will be hitting the treadmill at work tonight as well, maybe in a couple of hours when the 2:00/3:00am blahs kick in, especially after I didn’t get a chance to nap before work today because of the OT.

I began experimenting with different forms of wraps today. I love wraps so much, they are often a go-to for me for breakfast, but my new stomach does NOT like flour-based tortillas. They make the new stomach super duper unhappy, to the point where I often have to lie down afterward for at least an hour and wait for things to stop hurting. It’s not ideal, but I keep hoping against hope that today might be the day I tolerate them again! Alas. Anyway, I consulted Reddit and got a bunch of neat suggestions. One person suggested I try egg wraps, and since I wasn’t planning on a grocery run today I decided to make my own at home, since it’s pretty straightforward: two eggs, 1 tsp flour, 1 tsp water, salt and pepper to taste, cook like a super thin omelette. Easy and filled with protein! Unfortunately this, too, was rather too heavy for my stomach to tolerate, so I am going to try different kinds of lettuce to see if they cooperate any better, and then after that move onto different recipes (there’s apparently a lentil wrap made with red lentils and chickpea flour that has potential) and maybe rice paper or nori. Experimentation, ho! I am also wide open to suggestions from my delightful friends here, too! Your suggestions for tuna salad were great!

2-State of the smallholding

I am having to fight off my tendency to build castles in Spain. My ambitions, as usual, far exceed my time, energy, and financial resources. Like, right now I am barely keeping up with my daily responsibilities, but someone on Facebook put up a halter-trained pregnant Jersey Cow and I found myself briefly tempted to contact the seller, even though I have no money to buy a cow, no vehicle with which to transport it, no barn, no equipment, and no fucking clue how to handle a 1-ton animal that can kill me with one well-placed kick. Good fucking Lord, self.

I am considering moving my tools to the garage from the workshop until I can figure out why the workshop doesn’t have electricity anymore. The garage isn’t heated, so I might have to invest in some thermal underwear and fingerless gloves so I don’t freeze to death, but it might at least give me the opportunity to get some woodworking practice in and maybe get a small project going before I start tackling the really large stuff later this summer. My main concern is the quail, because I think the sawdust is not good for their sensitive little quail lungs. I did spot a portable dust extractor at Lee Valley Tools (a very dangerous place to shop unsupervised!) for $475. Not the cheapest ever, but certainly in the realm of affordable (as long as I don’t lose my job) by my current standards. Having a portable one would allow me to place myself in the furthest possible corner away from the quail to try to limit their exposure as much as possible, and then when I get electricity back to the workshop I could simply move it back there.

My hope is to build a bunch of sturdy, weatherproof enclosures in the early spring and summer for more poultry and meat rabbits. If I start working on it all in March, that gives me a fair bit of time for trial and error during the cutting/preliminary assembly process and eventually for the full building/assembly process outside where I want the structures to be “permanently” installed. I use the term “permanently” very loosely here, as I am quite sure I will have different opinions over the years about where things should go.

I haven’t yet fully decided where the enclosures should go. Ideally, they wouldn’t be too far from the house, because it’s kind of terrible to have to trek all the way across your property in the dead of winter to do animal husbandry of any kind. The quail are right across the way in the garage and even that is kind of miserable, and this winter hasn’t even been that harsh! I don’t want future!Phnee to curse me for forcing her to schlep through the snow and ice at -35°C during a serious cold snap in the coming years. :P It would also be helpful if the enclosures were partially sheltered from the wind, so it might make sense to put them up near the house, but I also wonder if that might not have unintended consequences for the walls/structure of the house (bird droppings and rabbit urine and general moisture come to mind). It could be a problem, or it could be nothing, but I simply don’t know. I will have to talk to more experienced owners and get some educated opinions. I could also put the enclosures just on the other side of the garage, but since I will have to tear down said garage in a few years, I am loath to do it. Mind you, I could also just do that and have it be a problem for future!Phnee, as long as I accept that she will likely curse my name when the time comes. It’s a quandary, for sure.

Because I understand my propensity for building castles in Spain that are well above my actual capacity, what I am trying to do with this planning is to eliminate as many of the barriers I know can and will crop up that would prevent me from tending my animals properly: inconvenient clean-up is a big problem, as is access to water and electricity. I will have to make sure that all the enclosures are close enough to an electrical source so that I can heat the water dispensers in the winter, and also not have to schlep dozens of gallons of water super far so that no one dies of dehydration. The ease of clean-up will be largely dependent on the design of the enclosures, so I will have to do more research on the best designs that are also relatively beginner-friendly, or I may have to ask some of my more experienced friends for help with some of the cutting and building.

None of that is going to happen this week, of course. This may be a project for next week, which is my first week off after my night shifts, or it might have to be pushed to the last week of January, depending on time and energy levels and just how much “disposable” money I have after most of my paycheque goes to everyday expenses. Life has become very expensive indeed. *sigh*

3-State of the news

Well, Trump is still threatening to use military force to seize Greenland “whether they like it or not.” For fuck’s sake. Denmark’s Prime Minister is not having it, unsurprisingly, and both Germany and Sweden have spoken up in defense of Denmark, so things could get very interesting, diplomatically speaking. The NATO Supreme Allied Commander has also stated that alliance members are “discussing Greenland’s status.” Not ominous at all, nope.

I haven’t talked much about Iran, mostly because I am embarrassingly not fully up to date with what’s going on there. Right now almost 650 people have been killed in protests there since December 28th. As far as I understand it, the protests began in response to rampant inflation but quickly transformed into general protests against the country’s regime and spread across the country. The US has, of course, threatened to intervene if Iran uses force against the protestors, which has as far as I can tell only fanned the flames, although it appears Iran is making somewhat conciliatory noises in their direction. The Grand Ayatollah Khamenei has basically told Trump to mind his fucking beeswax, and of course Trump does not wish to mind his fucking beeswax, because his fucking beeswax is full of pedophiles and fascists and he would like people to not focus on that, please and thank you.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Carney is off to China to try to diversify our trading portfolio and attract new investors, since the US is becoming an increasingly volatile and unreliable trade partner. I’m a little conflicted about this, mostly because the Chinese government is, well… *gestures expansively* But it’s undeniable that China is one of the great global powers to be reckoned with, and they are pioneering a lot of green(er), environmentally sounder initiatives, among other things. Their foreign policy, especially with regards to Taiwan, is personally abhorrent, but I also understand why our PM would not want to snub them from an international relations perspective. It’s complicated, I guess!

BC is either flooding or under flood warning, depending on the area. The Chilliwack River area in particular has been hit hard by the floods, and the residents are under an evacuation order at this point. I hope everyone makes it out safely.

Speaking of BC, there’s a case going before the Supreme Court now that’s going to be challenging the constitutional validity of a provision that prohibits MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) in publicly funded faith-based institutions. Right now, if an institution is faith-based (i.e. probably Christian) they can refuse to provide MAiD on their property and force terminally ill patients to be transferred to another hospital in order to end their lives. Now, I have very mixed feelings about MAiD. I think that, in principle, it is an excellent idea: everyone should have the right to choose their manner of death if it’s feasible (sudden and accidental deaths being a common enough phenomenon). However, there has been a lot of evidence over the years that the system is being used/abused in order to target lower income and disabled people, especially those with long-term but not actually terminal diagnoses, and to pressure them into accepting MAiD in order to relieve the system of the “burden” of their care, and that is abhorrent. If it’s an issue that could be solved by better access to health care services, then MAiD shouldn’t even be on the table. Also, medical practitioners should not, in theory, ever suggest it to the patient, the patient needs to bring it up themselves. Since the system exists, however, I do agree that religious healthcare institutions, if they are publicly funded, have a duty of care to all members of the public. It’s for the same reason I firmly believe they should not be allowed to deny birth control or abortion care: health care should be evidence-based, not faith-based. Faith is wonderful (I am a practicing Quaker, after all), but it should be there to support people on their journeys and not needlessly add to their suffering. I am interested to see how this court case goes!

There was apparently a pretty massive anti-immigration rally in Toronto this weekend as well as a counter-protest, all of which ended up with eight arrests and 29 charges being laid. It looks like it started with a “Stop Mass Immigration Rally,” which is laughable because the federal government has already slashed immigration quotas and the country is suffering because no Canadian citizen wants to do the low-paying jobs typically taken on by foreign worker programs and other marginalized folks who have come to this country. Like, is the mass immigration in the room with us, buddy? Are you feeling okay? Do you need some water? Anyway, things got out of hand, police are blaming “both sides,” and everyone is scheduled to appear in court at the end of February.

I do NOT like the direction in which Canada is going. We’ve had a growing problem with the far right, exemplified by the so-called “Freedom Convoy” of 2022, and it appears nothing is being done about it. I must confess I’m at something of a loss as well about what I can do about it personally, but there must be something I am missing. Maybe I will check in with some activist friends and see if they have concrete suggestions for me. Otherwise I can easily see us going the way of the USA if the right “charismatic” leader comes along.

Oh, and in “no one is surprised” news, Ontarians have continued to drink way too much since the inception of the pandemic. Weekly binge drinking is up 3.6% since 2019, hazardous or harmful drinking (i.e. early signs of alcohol dependence) is up 3.3%, and symptoms of alcohol dependence increased by 4.7%. There’s also been a spike in the abuse of illicit AND prescription drugs, and a spoke in people reporting mental distress and poor mental health. Suicidal ideation increased from 3.9% to 6.4%, too. Gosh, I wonder why ALL THAT could be? The article, of course, blames it on social isolation from Covid, which is such contrived bullshit, I cannot even. We have not socially isolated in five years. People are getting multiple Covid infections a year, which is wreaking havoc on minds and bodies. Inflation is out of control, people are getting priced out of being able to live under a roof, let alone comfortably, and all around us people and governments are sliding into fascism. PEOPLE ARE STRESSED OUT BECAUSE OF COLLAPSE, BOB.

*rips out hair*

ANYWAY. In more neutral news, I wasn’t able to go to my town council meeting today because of the overtime at work. I have marked my calendar for the next meeting, and I will make a point of reading the minutes when I get a chance.

I wonder if I can find some good news on which to end this post. Otherwise, it does feel horribly depressing. Ooh! Apparently, there’s a generic version of a very expensive Cystic Fibrosis drug becoming available! From what I can see the name brand costs a horrifying $300,00 to $370,000 a year, which the pharmaceutical company claims is based on their trying to recoup the costs they incurred while producing it. However, a Bangladeshi pharmaceutical company will be offering a generic brand for about $6,750 a year for adults and $2,000 for children, which will make it a lot more accessible (although it still won’t be free, which would be the ideal scenario). This is very exciting news and I am very pleased that I found it so I can end this post on a high note.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: frustrated

I’m backdating this post, and we’re all going to pretend that’s not what’s happening, mmkay? ;)

1-State of the Phnee

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend. Last week took a bit more out of me than I thought, so I did take it a bit easier today than I had initially planned, but I did get stuff done!

Starting with yesterday (Saturday), I got up at ridiculous o’clock to go get blood tests done. KK also needed blood tests, so we planned to go together, except she forgot to set an alarm, so we ended up leaving forty minutes later than I wanted to. I should know better than to rely on her for early morning departures—the only time she ever gets up on time is when she has to go to work or to a medical appointment for herself. We get our bloodwork done at a local lab which KK said only takes walk-ins on weekends (but that I learned after the fact does in fact take appointments, so I will know for next time), so I guess there wasn’t enough urgency in it for her to get up on time.

Because we got there 40 minutes later than I wanted (i.e. right when they opened), we had a very long wait. KK has been reading a supernatural romance/comedy/smut novel about a half-demon(?) girl named Clarissa and made a valiant attempt to explain the plot to me as we drove there, as we waited, and all the way back home. For a lighthearted romance it was very convoluted. :P

We took advantage of the road trip to stop first by Canadian Tire so I could pick up more extension cords (you can never have too many!), stopped by the bank so I could have cash on me for my later trip to the local market, and we also stopped by the U-Haul self-storage facility where KK moved all her stuff late last year which she had in storage in the city ever since she moved in with me. She wanted me to see the space, since there’s room left to store some of my furniture as well, which will be useful. I’m not convinced I want to use the space, but I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense since it’s available. I’m just leery of taking on yet another of her expenses, since I’m pretty sure it means she’s going to start reimbursing herself from the joint account diligently, and there’s already not enough money in there to cover our expenses as it is if I don’t supplement it with my own money. *sigh*

I went back to the Martintown Market for produce, and I am pleased with the quality of the produce on offer there. I don’t think it’s necessarily local produce, but they source it very cheaply, so I can buy almost all that we need any given week for $15. I also bought a pork shoulder for $20, which I cooked tonight in the Instant Pot. The meat itself was spectacular, but I made the mistake of trusting the recipe I found online despite my misgivings about their choice of spices, so the flavour was not what I was hoping for. Next time I will eschew trusting the process and trust my gut instead. Luckily the meat was so delicious and tender that it more than made up for the lacklustre and slightly odd flavour.

I stayed up way too late with my D&D friends chatting about the new campaign and joking about the fact that we were a pack of neurodivergent nerds just parallel playing as we created our characters for a while. I think we sat in near silence for almost an hour at one point while we were all looking up statistics and various bits of gear. It was a lot of fun, and I am jazzed about the upcoming campaign. I need to firm up my character’s backstory and then write it all down for the DM to exploit as he sees fit, and I have a little under two weeks to do that. I may bore you all at a later date with my character concept and stuff, but not right now, as it’s not all clear in my head yet. But yay D&D!

A hefty chunk of Sunday got taken up by Quaker Meeting for Worship, followed by Meeting for Worship for Business, which lasted until 2:30pm! Ugh. I understand that Quaker processes are important, but sometimes they feel unnecessarily ponderous and cumbersome. Oh well, it’s a good way for me to keep a finger on the pulse of the Meeting, even if I don’t participate super actively.

There’s a bit of a controversy happening right now, because a member of Peace and Social Concerns wants us to sign the Apartheid-Free Community Pledge written by the Apartheid-Free Communities Coalition (which is a network of communities—mostly spiritual—that joined together loosely in 2022 to work to end what the consider the crime of apartheid in Palestine, which I agree with) along with the American Friends Service Committee. However, there is a small group of Friends who don’t want to sign the pledge, not because they don’t think that Israel is committing apartheid, but because the pledge contains the phrase “We declare ourselves an apartheid-free community,” and those Friends have rightly pointed out that we as a Monthly Meeting, as a Yearly Meeting (Canada-wide) and as a country have a LOT of work to do to dismantle our own system racism, oppression, and injustice. When we still have Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) massively overrepresented among victims, Indigenous people massively overrepresented in both the judicial and “child protective services” spheres, and dozens of Indigenous communities that still don’t have access to clean drinking water, I agree that it is a stretch to call ourselves “Apartheid-free.” Other Friends have said that the pledge should be aspirational (I paraphrase), but it does not sit right with me, the way it doesn’t sit right with the first group of Friends.

There is a “threshing session” about it this coming Saturday, but as I’m working night shifts, I don’t know that I will be able to attend. I already have to sacrifice most of my sleep on Sunday for the Worship Sharing for the State of Society Report, and working two back-to-back 12-hour shifts on less than 4 hours’ sleep each time sounds like an absolute nightmare, especially since I will be working nights all week this week with extra overtime to boot because we have people off sick and others doing training course so that there’s very little wriggle room left on the schedule. Extra money is nice, even if it’s just a handful of extra hours here and there for me. I am near the bottom of the OT list, so I know when they contact me it’s because they are kind of desperate, too.

2-State of the smallholding

I got stuff done! There was a thaw on Friday that stretched into Saturday, so I took advantage of it to clear all the snow and ice that had accumulated on the deck and got it perfectly clean and smooth and safe to walk on. Of course, it promptly started snowing again last night (Saturday) mere hours after I cleared it, and it continued snowing for the rest of the weekend. *sigh*

As I said before, a hefty chunk of Sunday got taken up by various Quaker things, but once that was done I made good on my promise to myself to start getting the house better organized. I didn’t make a ton of headway, but I DID unpack the last two boxes of books in my bedroom and tidied up everything except my desk (that might be a project for this week, since I think it won’t take more than an hour or so to do). So now I have a bit more floor space to work with, and the whole room is looking a little bit better than it was before. I got rid of some trash that had wedged itself in nooks and crannies (mostly rogue packing paper), swept the floor, and consolidated the laundry into baskets to be dealt with by future!Phnee.

The rest of my free time that day was taken up by making dinner and then having my weekly Zoom call with the parental units, who were in very good form, I am pleased to report. We have tentatively made plans for me to go visit them during the last week of January.

3-State of the news

I must regretfully admit that I spent the weekend under a rock and did not check any news headlines, let alone try a deeper dive into my usual outlets and sources. If you happen to know of anything important that I missed, please let me know!

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: accomplished

Maybe I will simply start using the day's date rather than coming up with titles each time.

1-State of the Phnee

I spotted an injured fox while out driving earlier today. I’m not an expert in wildlife by any means, but it looked very young, maybe less than a year old. It was crossing the road and limping badly, but it tried to hurry away when I approached. I didn’t think it would let me get near, but I did at least have to try. I hope that it was just a sprain and that it will be able to heal and not die during the hard winter months. It was a real bummer, but it fled across the fields and I don’t think there’s a reliable way for me to go back, locate, and trap it to bring it to a wildlife rehab centre, alas.

In other news, ADHD is a wild ride sometimes. Remember how I got myself some locking dumbbells so I could do weightlifting exercises at home? Yeah. So, it turns out I did not read the product description carefully enough when I bought the product, and the box only comes with ONE dumbbell in it, which makes for some pretty lopsided exercises in many instances (especially when I want to use them to assist with squats or lunges or whatever). Fine, easily fixed, they’re on sale, whatever. I also thought that they went up in 5lb increments, but no, they go up in 10lb increments, which is a LOT for a baby beginner like me. My current thought is that I’m going to try to find some 5lb wrist or ankle weights and “attach” them to the dumbbell whenever I need to go up by 5lbs, but I’m not sure how feasible that is.

I’m keeping all of my new-to-me equipment in my bedroom, which faithful readers will remember is on the small side (9 x 11 feet), to the point where I had to invest in a Murphy bed in order to save on space. Right now my itty-bitty home gym tucks away nicely under the bed, but I can’t get much more “extra” equipment without running out of floor space in which to actually perform the exercises I want to do. I did invest in a 20lb kettle bell as well (I have a 15lb one already) as well as a jump rope and a set of small resistance bands to complement the longer ones I have. The portable treadmill should be arriving in the next week or so as well, and I am very glad it stores upright and seems to be pretty compact.

I do need to take some time, maybe this weekend, to organize my room a bit more so I’ll have more space to move around. KK has loaned me her dresser for my clothes, but I’ve found I’m not really using it and it’s taking up lots of space that I could be using for other purposes. I didn’t use the dresser I had at the old house either, and KK’s is kind of busted so the drawers stick in a way that makes it really hard to use, so it’s an extra reason not to use it. I’m going to try to haul it to her storage unit this weekend and free up that space.

Unrelated to anything, I miss playing video games. Between work and the much longer commute and the responsibilities that go along with a new smallholding, I have managed to play for maybe 15-20 minutes a handful of times since we moved. I’d like to get back to Stardew Valley and Don’t Starve and Borderlands and all the other games I enjoy. I don’t foresee getting into new games anytime soon, but being able to just turn off my brain and get some free dopamine sounds really appealing these days.

2-State of the smallholding

I discovered a quailbreak when I checked on the quail last night. Sometime in the previous 24 hours two of the quail somehow got out of their hutch, probably when I was changing out their food/water/bedding and were sitting next to it huddled together for warmth, looking extremely out of sorts. I chucked them back inside and they seemed much happier to be back with their covey where the food and water and friendship is to be found. Because I suspected they might have been out there for about 24 hours, I was quite worried that the stress, cold, and dehydration might kill them, but I checked them a few times today and they appear to be hanging in there. I’ve had a lot of quail die in the past year, some of which was entirely my fault and some of which I assume is my fault but I can’t figure out what I did wrong, and I don’t know which feels worse, to be honest.

I’m really looking forward to the spring/summer, when I will be building some proper poultry housing for the quail as well as for future other poultry (chickens, ducks, maybe some other game birds because I like game birds). I am still researching different models and layouts in order to find one that I not only like but that seems like it won’t be too difficult to build as a beginner carpenter. Is it carpentry when you build an outbuilding? Or is it woodworking? I think it’s carpentry. Words are hard! I also want to build rabbit hutches and start down the road of breeding meat rabbits. Ideally, I’d like to get to the point where we are raising most of our own protein, moving away from beef and pork. In theory I could start growing Timothy hay (which is one of the main things you feed to rabbits) on part of the property, which could help to reduce feed costs, but I may be getting out over my skis with that one. All in due time, I guess.

I need to figure out how to hack my own brain between now and the springtime so I can get over my problems with task initiation, especially with larger projects that feel intimidating to me for any number of reasons. I have noticed that if a project seems really big or labour-intensive or involves using a tool with which I’m not familiar, it builds up into a Big Thing in my mind and I put off doing it. The problem, of course, is that setting up the things I want on the property is going to require a ton of very large, labour-intensive projects, almost all of which involve using new-to-me tools (everything from power tools to lawn mowers to snowblowers).

This is part of the reason I’ve started working out. I figure if I improve my cardiovascular fitness, my overall strength, endurance, balance and flexibility, then some of the work I want to do will at least feel physically less terrible. That will, I hope, remove one of the self-imposed barriers I have when it comes to getting shit done. I hate feeling hot and sweaty and struggling with heavy things (especially when I can feel my back *trying* to give out on me), and if I can train myself to better deal with the heavy things (I will be hot and sweaty in the summer regardless, but I want it to be because of the heat and not because my physical conditioning is shit). Losing weight will also likely help with that: if I have to haul around less of myself, then it stands to reason it should make things easier.

I’m hoping to leverage my very accommodating friends to help me with the psychological barrier of “OMG I have never used this piece of equipment and I am SKURRED!” In some cases, I will just have to find a ladder and get over myself, of course, but I am trying very hard to acknowledge where I get in my own way and try to accommodate the fact that I am apparently neurodivergent as all fuck and see how to remove barriers in the most effective way possible for now.

Speaking of projects I don’t want to do, I am going to do my best to find the aforementioned ladder to get over myself this weekend and work on continuing to organize the house. I mentioned doing that in my bedroom, and I think that will be my priority, but I also know that I feel better and am able to get more stuff done when I don’t constantly live in cluttered chaos. It doesn’t help that KK is constantly adding to the mess and clutter faster than I can clean and tidy up after the both of us, but I think if I push really hard I can make some progress on that front. The main reason I haven’t is what I mentioned above: the project feels too big and overwhelming (and I’m tired and I don’t wanna!) and is physically super uncomfortable because I’m constantly having to move and bend and twist in ways that range from unpleasant to painful. It’s so much easier to just stay in my room or find a chair and fiddle around with my cell phone, but that’s no way to build a life that feels rich and meaningful, you know? I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage it this weekend, but I am setting my intention to get started on that and maybe start picking up some momentum there. The cleaner it gets (I hope) the more motivated I will be to keep cleaning, and eventually I will have it tidy enough that I can hire someone to come in twice a month and help keep it clean and tidy.

I am also going to try once again to get the snow blower to work. Dylan showed me how to get it started during Un-Christmas, but even he couldn’t get it to keep running after it was started. I will have to consult YouTube to see if I can find some instructions or better yet a tutorial. We’ve had even more snowfall in the past 24 hours, and I would like to clear some pathways around the property so that I can get around more easily (I have compost that really needs to go in the bin, for instance).

3-State of the news

In today’s “Well, this is horrifying” news, an ICE agent was filmed straight-up murdering a woman today in Minneapolis by shooting her rep. This isn’t the first person they’ve murdered, of course, but it’s the first white woman, so it’s making headlines the way it never would for a person of colour. *sigh* I suppose in a way it’s “good” because this might (might?) be a catalyst for change, but I’m not holding my breath, here.

Seasonal flu is an absolute BEAR this season, with hospitals already overwhelmed and tapping into overflow space. It seems especially contagious and deadly, too, a strain of H3N2 which tends to be more virulent, from the very little reading I’ve done. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of HPAI hiding among all the Influenza A cases, since NO ONE APPEARS TO BE ACTIVELY TESTING FOR IT, JFC. /o\ Sorry for the all-caps, I am frustrated beyond all get out.

Oh, and the USA is still threatening to invade Greenland. No big deal, I guess. Fuck everything.

Maybe I should stop ending these posts with politics, it’s way too depressing. I’ll have to do a “feel-good” segment, like on the local news where they have the cute pet of the week or something. ;)

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: determined

Okay, I am going to attempt a State of the Everything kind of post for today, following (more or less) the template I created for myself so I can stay a bit more on top of not just what’s going on in my life (and in my head), but also what’s going on around me politically and just generally. Bear with me, this may get long.

1- State of the Phnee

a. Work has been uneventful of late, although the holiday season is always a busy one for travel, especially air travel. We get a much higher volume of “unruly passenger” reports at this time of year, and that means proportionally a higher volume of unruly passenger with escalation reports. The holidays combine a ton of stress with a lot more access to alcohol, especially in airports and on planes, and the results are pretty predictable. My own belief is that airports and airlines need to stop serving and selling alcohol, and that would reduce the number of incidents by about 90% (that number is an educated guess on my part, not based on actual statistics, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark).

I applied to a similar job in a different government department, one that’s not part of the Core Public Service. I was sent a two-hour online evaluation without any indication of the format or what would be in it, which was more stressful than the test itself. I was reminded of Pete Anderson in The War with Mr. Wizzle by Gordon Korman: “Sir, what’s a Keat?” I should really find those books and re-read them. They were pretty great at the time and I only hope they’ve held up after all these years. Anyway, I think I did pretty well, but I submitted the evaluation right before the holiday season, so I’m not expecting a response before next week at the earliest. They could also easily just never answer me again, because of the neat little disclaimer that “only successful candidates will be contacted” at the bottom of the application page. Gotta love those. How hard is it to send a one-line email to unsuccessful candidates? You can program that shit, too. I know whereof I speak, because I have been the person in the hiring seat, and I think it’s shitty to leave people in limbo, especially in the government where hiring processes are slow as fuck.

If I get this new job (fingers crossed!) it would be a step up in terms of compensation from where I am now, and it looks like it would be an indeterminate position (which is as close to a “permanent” job as you can get in the government these days), so I really hope it works out. It’s the kind of job I know I’m good at, so it’s really just a question of slogging through the application process, which is very hit-or-miss these days. The physical location is also a tad closer to home, so I might save an itty bit of money on gas and wear-and-tear on the car.

b. I had my parents and my friends Dylan and Sarah over for Un-Christmas this year, since I was working on Christmas Day proper. It’s been a couple of years since I had to declare Un-Christmas, but it went very well. I did not at all follow through on my previous meal plan which was far too ambitious for the amount of time and energy I had. I ended up roasting the goose I had ordered and making lemon pepper buttery green beans (made with not-real butter because of various dietary restrictions), and Sarah brought roasted root vegetables. In the end, we had more than enough food even as it was, so I don’t have many regrets on that front. I always end up making way too much food, so this way there was considerably less waste.

I also managed to muster enough spoons to actually chuck the goose carcass into a Dutch oven and made broth, which I will try to turn into something useful this weekend. I have a bit of leftover goose meat, so it will likely be a soup of some kind.

c. We had a bit of a scare with KK a couple of weeks ago. She woke me up about twenty minutes after I’d gone to sleep (I’d decided to call it an early night because I was super tired) and I found her covered in blood because she’d passed out repeatedly and smashed her face on her bathroom floor. I ended up calling an ambulance for her because she couldn’t even sit up, let alone get to her feet and walk to the car. We spent the night in the ER and she spent the rest of the day there as well after I went home to get a few hours of sleep and take care of the dogs, including medicating the epileptic chihuahua. She got stitches in her nose and a tentative diagnosis of mild dehydration combined with too high of a dosage for her blood pressure meds now that she’s lost weight post-surgery. We’ve had no incidents since then, but she also fell badly and further injured one knee and hip, so she’s been having a lot of trouble getting around even just from her bedroom to the living room. It hasn’t meaningfully changed anything for me in terms of workload, though, since I’d already been doing most of the housekeeping stuff since long before we moved, let alone after her surgery and other stuff happened. I had hoped that she’d be able to help out more once she lost some weight and was able to move around better, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case.

d. Speaking of surgery, I have almost fully recovered from mine in October apart from some lingering fatigue. I’ve lost about 45 lbs since the end of September, and although my weight fluctuates a lot from day to day, the trend is definitely downward. My main struggle is remembering to take my medications and supplements on time. Before I could just take all my meds first thing in the morning and forget about it, but now there’s a schedule, and some things have to be taken with food and other things have to be taken at least 30 minutes before food, and it all wreaks havoc with my poor ADHD brain.

I finally started incorporating a tiny bit of exercise into my day. Work has a pilot project with under-the-desk treadmills, so I’ve been using those for 1-2 hours almost every shift at a slow pace (1 mph, because for some reason the treadmills measure everything in Imperial), and my legs are mad at me for reminding them that I have muscles for stuff other than sitting on my ass. I’m making an effort to use the treadmills as 1) it’s good for me and 2) I want to encourage my employer to continue making good decisions about employee welfare (and yes, I’m aware of the irony, but we do what we can). I’m considering getting one for home, as well, as there are some available for under $200 that look decent enough. I had originally planned to get a gym membership, but I’m veeeeery cautiously optimistic that I can do some walking and use resistance bands at first to get my strength and endurance up, because I know myself, and getting to the gym when it’s a minimum 30-minute drive from my home is going to be a struggle, psychologically speaking. There’s a chance that the home equipment will gather dust, but there’s a much stronger chance that a gym membership would just drain my bank account without ever getting used, so lesser of two evils, here.

e. I had to take Pixie to the emergency vet on Tuesday after KK told me she had been throwing up. I had flashbacks to November when I had to take Peggy in for the same reason and came out with a bill close to $1,000, a diagnosis of acute gastroenteritis, pain meds and several cans of special food (she’s fine now, albeit on prophylactic antibiotics for her anal glands). Luckily Pixie was not nearly as sick, and I ended up paying a $50 triage fee and then took her home for observation, and she’s now back to her usual frolicky self. She is on a strict diet of rice and probiotics until tomorrow, however, until I’m completely satisfied that whatever ick this is, is out of her system.

The cats are still going strong so far. I’m worried about Libby, who still refuses to come out of the basement even at night. I don’t think KK has been feeding her her special kidney food, and because I don’t go to the basement much it’s hard to keep an eye on her weight. I’m considering catnapping her and taking her to the vet to be weighed and evaluated, but I should probably check with KK about that. Octavia is fully back to her old self after her dental surgery, but Juno doesn’t appear to be gaining weight back the same way, which has me a little worried as well. Libby is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15 or even 16 years old now, and Juno is around 13, while Octavia will be turning 12 this May (give or take), so none of them are spring chickens, but I’m still concerned there might be more going on with Juno since the dental surgery hasn’t had the same effect as on Octavia.

2- State of the smallholding

I’m not using the word “homestead” anymore, because of its roots in colonization. I haven’t found a good word to describe what I’m attempting, and the closest I’ve come so far is “smallholding,” so I’m going to go with that until something better comes along.

a. Welp, the house hasn’t improved much since I last updated here. I’ve mostly lacked the motivation and energy to do anything about it, especially after surgery in October. I did do a bit of a crisis clean for Un-Christmas, and I’m hoping to build on that in the coming weeks. I need to get over the mostly psychological barriers around cleaning and tidying that I have built in my own head and just do it. Once the main floor of the house is clear I am going to find a local cleaner/cleaning service to help me keep on top of stuff. If someone can come in once every two weeks, even, that would allow me to concentrate on more decluttering and making progress with other areas of the house. My friend Jan has also offered to come over and lend her organizing expertise to help pull the kitchen and basement into a shape that will make them more usable, and I am probably going to take her up on that.

b. On the “farming” front, the remaining quail are doing pretty well this winter. I have 14 survivors in total, four males and eight females. I purchased some heaters for their waterers because their water kept freezing within hours. Dylan had told me he managed by changing the chickens’ water twice a day because he could just dump out the ice and replace it with water, but the quail waterers are so much smaller that it just wasn’t practical for me. The heaters, even though they appear super flimsy and cheap, have actually been working super well to keep the water liquid, and the quail appear to appreciate it.

I did have a bit of a scare about a month ago when I got home on a Saturday morning after a night shift and found an alarming splotch of blood in one of the enclosures. It took me a bit to identify where it had come from, and it turned out that one of the females had a pretty gnarly prolapsed vent. I tried calling around to various vets, but even though I now live in the country, I couldn’t find anyone who dealt with poultry—it was only pets or large livestock (cows and horses, mostly), so I was left with the internet and whatever I had on hand. I took the quail inside, bathed her in saline solution (where I discovered she’d been sort-of egg-bound with an improperly formed egg), applied a bit of sugar to shrink the prolapse, and then used a lubricated q-tip to gently nudge everything back inside her. I kept her in a “hospital” box in the dark with food and water for a couple of days, and then she started spontaneously laying eggs without a new prolapse, so I returned her to her enclosure, where she’s been happily laying eggs for me ever since. I am quite proud that I managed to successfully treat her and not have to cull her.

I was sorely tempted to start beekeeping this summer, but upon reflection I have decided to wait another year before embarking on that journey at least. There is a lot of equipment required for bees, and I have a lot more reading and learning to do before I dive into it. There’s a good chance that my first hives will die (because beginner beekeepers are a fucking menace, apparently), so I want to improve the odds that I don’t kill my bees because of a stupid mistake. I

This year I will be adding livestock that’s a little more straightforward, i.e. rabbits and maybe more poultry like chicken and ducks and maybe geese. The rabbits in particular will be good for meat, and I am curious if I can find something to do with their pelts: maybe tan them myself or just sell them to anyone who wants them. I tested out dehydrated rabbit ears on the dogs and they lost their tiny doggy minds about them, so at least I know I’ll have a steady source of dog treats if I play my cards right.

c. I have a lot of ambitious goals this year in terms of acquiring new skills around the smallholding. I wanted to practice woodworking this winter, but unfortunately the electricity went out in my shed for reasons I can’t quite figure out, so I think it will have to wait for spring when I can figure out why there’s no power out there.

I’ve also talked to Jan and Dylan and Sarah, and there is a tentative plan in place to cooperate with all three of our little farms to get larger projects built more quickly. We’d alternate weekends where we all gather at one farm and do a building or gardening project, followed by a celebratory barbecue in the evening once the work is done. We’ve also tentatively agreed that we should have dinner together more often, after a really fun Hallowe’en dinner in October. I want to make sure I keep fostering my local bonds and friendships, because it’s all too easy for me to crawl under a rock and just live there, especially because of the shift work.

3- Local and national news

I promised myself I’d keep my finger on the pulse of the news this year, so in spite of working an evening shift this week and next week, I’m making an effort to learn about what’s going on.

a. Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry: there isn’t a ton happening in my immediate area right now, but I went to my local town council meeting in late November (or was it early December?) in order to stay abreast of local happenings. The next meeting is in two weeks, before my next night shift, and I plan on attending again at that time. It’s important to me to understand what decisions are being made locally, just in case I decide that something is important enough for me to voice an opinion or whatever.

b. There hasn’t been much going on in Ottawa from a city news perspective over the holidays, but I’m keeping an eye out.

c. Ontario politics are a bit of a shambles ever since Doug Ford’s government won a THIRD fucking majority. I am still angry about that. The provincial Liberals and NDP seem to be in shambles, and the NDP in particular appear to be struggling with who they want to be. I hope they get their shit together soon.

d. Federal politics have been on hiatus for the holidays as well, although I saw that Prime Minister Carney met with President Zelenskyy earlier and will be at the peace talks in Paris next week. What he’s bringing to the table is a mystery to me, but better Carney than Trump, I suppose.

We’re still embroiled in a horrible trade ~thing~ with the USA. It’s not a war, but it’s not NOT a war. Tariffs and jokes in poor taste and all of that. Anecdotally a lot of Canadians are still not purchasing American products when there are alternatives, and tourism to the USA has plummeted (partly due to the animosity engendered by Trump, partly because there’s a reasonable likelihood that Canadian citizens could be apprehended by ICE and disappeared for anywhere from a week to forever). I miss my US friends, but until things stop being fascist down there, I don’t plan on visiting any time soon.

e. Speaking of the USA, it continues to be a horrifying dumpster fire. The ICE raids continue, they are building data centres faster than anyone ever imagined, the economy is tanking, and the President is very obviously suffering from some sort of advanced dementia. Charlie Kirk was murdered, which triggered a right-wing backlash from which some parts of the US are still reeling. The Department of Education has been gutted, among others, and we still don’t have a good idea of how many people have died as a result of the dismantling of USAID. I don’t have any real good thoughts or analysis about this right now, but luckily there are plenty of people out there smarter than me who have written or spoken about this topic.

Okay, I think that’s enough for now. Thanks for bearing with me this far! I promise future updates won’t be nearly as lengthy, since I won’t be trying to catch up on basically six months’ worth of updates.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: determined

Happy New Year, everyone! Time for my annual Jillian Holzmann gif, which for some reason I CANNOT get to display on DW. Sorry, folks. It's my favourite.

2025 was a beast, friends, and it almost got the better of me several times, but I am still here, a little battered around the edges but here nonetheless. I won't go as far as to say "still standing," but sitting up seems to be a pretty good compromise. ;)

I have to say, I am not expecting 2026 to be much better globally. I think we're going to see more economic hardship, probably a bird flu pandemic that no one will report on because the US is busy burying their data while destroying what's left of their healthcare system, a lot more international conflict, and probably yet another record-breaking year of climate disasters.

That being said, the plan is to keep on keepin' on. I'm turning 47 in four days, and so it's time to get back on the horse, or get up on the horse for the first time depending on what we're talking about, and work on myself, since that's the only thing I have even a little bit of control over (more or less).

I kind of fell off the bandwagon of posting every day, so I'm going to try to get back to that starting today. I also noticed that so much happened last year in the news and social media and even in my life that I've forgotten most of it. Like, "Oh yeah, it was THIS year that Elon Musk threw that Nazi salute!" and "Fuck me, I'd almost forgotten about the California wildfires!" and " Oh, geez, there was an actual election this year and it feels like it happened ten years ago!" etc.

I felt like I was constantly slightly behind this year when it came to the news, and then it all leaked out of my brain anyway, so this year I'm going to try to be a bit more diligent and less haphazard about how I write my journal updates. I've created a template (subject to tweaks/changes as things progress) which should prompt me to try to document things as they happen:

1- Daily personal updates (basically "what happened to me today").

2- Updates on personal/household projects.

3- Local and national news updates.

4- International news updates.

5- Miscellaneous (basically whatever doesn't fit into the above categories).

I'm at work, so I may or may not write a proper update for today a little later, depending on how busy things get. It will mostly consist of my new and continuing goals for the year, so if I don't post it you won't be missing much. ;)

Take care of yourselves, friends, and I'll catch you on the flip side.

Current Mood: busy

I've been on a "liver-shrinking" diet since October 1st, which consists of meal replacement shakes, better-known in our household as "Sadness Shakes." I'm also allowed roughly the equivalent of two cups of raw green veggies a day (I've stuck to celery, broccoli, and green peppers) as well as clear liquids (water and broth, basically). It's fine, but I miss real food, so I've been coping by planning this year's Christmas menu.

I'm actually working over Christmas this year, so I will be resurrecting the UnChristmas tradition of yore. This will also be our first Christmas post-bariatric surgery for both me and KK, so I am trying to plan dishes that I can portion out quite small and/or that will keep well if I freeze them afterward. Last year I made a roast goose which was reasonably successful, so I'm going to do that again this year. With more room to work in the kitchen and the experience from last year, I'm hoping to improve on last year's performance.

So far this year's menu looks like this:

Amuse-bouches: asparagus mousse, truffle bacon and eggs, and parmesan lollipops
Entrée: creamy roasted red pepper soup
Main course: roast goose, wild rice, and lemon pepper buttery green beans
Salad: beet salad with goat cheese
Cheese: TBD, but it will be 3-4 cheeses
Dessert: Ile Flottante (it's my mother's favourite and doesn't look too difficult to make)

I also have to plan for the next couple of weeks after surgery, when I'll be on a mostly liquid and soft food diet, so on Monday I'm going to make some soup ahead of time and freeze it using my new Souper Cubes, which are silicon moulds that come in 1/2 and 1 cup sizes (also 2 cups, but I didn't bother getting those because both KK and I require quite small portions now. The cubes so far have been a game changer for food prep, almost as much as switching to a vacuum sealer instead of Ziplock bags (no more freezer burn!). Eventually I want to move away from the freezer as my main form of food preservation, but for the moment it's all been a godsend.

Depending on how much time I have on Monday and Tuesday, I'm planning on making split pea soup, squash soup, lentil soup, and maybe a potato-leek soup (I always call it Vichyssoise, but I think it only counts as Vichyssoise if it's cold). That should keep me in soup for a very long time, because KK doesn't eat most of those soups--the only one she likes is the potato-leek soup.

I originally toyed with the idea of doing something with quail for Christmas, but I'm holding off until I know for sure my current little flock is sustainable. I lost my last original female last night, which has made me very sad. She and her husband have a terrible habit of throwing their water around their enclosure, and last night the temperature plummeted to just below freezing, so I think she got wet and couldn't regulate her body temperature properly. I'm going to switch out their watering setup to see if I can convince the silly birds not to play water park with their drinking water and accidentally off themselves in the process.

All righty. Work is picking up, so I'm going to leave it there for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

I got a fair bit of stuff done today.

I got up at a very reasonable 6:30am, showered, and took my car to Canadian Tire for (another) alignment. The whole process took less than an hour, so I just waited at a nearby Tim Horton's and had breakfast with a lemon poppy seed muffin which startled me by having some sort of cream cheese filling that I was not expecting. It tasted just fine, but it was weirdly jarring nonetheless. This just tells me that my capacity for dealing with unexpected change is now in the negative numbers.

Once the car was organized, I drove to Cornwall (the nearest large town, although it might technically count as a city? Hang on, I will go look that up. *two minutes later* It's a city. Okay. Moving on.) to go to Home Depot and finally bite the bullet on getting a riding lawn mower. I did a bit of research into the various options, and even though they cost a bit more money, I settled on a John Deere. All the reviews of the more inexpensive models boiled down to the same thing: "It's not worth it, just get a John Deere and have done." Mostly all the other models seem to have poor warranties, lack servicing options, have parts that are hard or impossible to get, or just continuously break down. So I got a John Deere, and it will be delivered on Thursday.

I had a rather circular conversation with the nice young lady serving me at Home Depot. She was a tiny, wispy thing, probably of Indian origin based on her accent and the bracelets adorning her wrists (although I couldn't swear to it), and the poor thing spoke barely above a whisper and had the maddening habit of looking anywhere but at me when she spoke. This may have been cultural or just a personality quirk, but either way, it was not ideal. Long-time readers will remember that I am rather hard of hearing, and so people who speak quietly and/or face away from me when they speak are my kryptonite.

Conversely, she seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding me as well. I asked about financing options, to see if I could avoid having to shell out another $5k right on the spot (everything is so expensive, goddamn), and she agreed and brought me over to customer service.

Her: "You want to finance or use credit card?"

Me: "I'd like to see if I qualify for financing so I don't have to put it on my credit card, please."

Her: "So you use your own credit card?"

Me: "No, I'd like to get financing."

Her: "You want a credit card?"

Me: "Well, Home Depot gives you one with financing, right?"

Her: "Yes."

Me: "Great. Let's do that!"

Her: "Okay, so you go over to the cash and you pay with your credit card now."

Me: "So... you can't do the financing?"

Her: *blank look*

We were saved by another employee named Ariel (I don't know the name of the first woman because she didn't have a name tag), who was able to walk us through the process, thank goodness. It took a while, but now I can pay off the mower over the next 12 months instead of all in one go, with no interest unless I exceed those 12 months.

I had to pop back to Canadian Tire after that because they had neglected to give me the readout for the alignment, and luckily they still had it in their system (apparently the machine doesn't keep it beyond the one reading, but they hadn't had another client in for an alignment yet, or at least that's how I understood it). I sent the readout to Steve the Wonder Mechanic, and he is of the opinion that the dealership simply never did an alignment on my car back in the day. What they did with my car when they kept it for a full 36 hours and charged me $150 for the privilege is beyond me at this point. I am going to have to rally some spoons from somewhere in order to fight them on this and get reimbursed for the work and for the brand new winter tires that they wrecked due to their negligence.

Anyway, I finally made it home five-ish hours after I'd left, put in a load of laundry (everyone clap, please!) and set about continuing to unpack my bedroom. As of right now I am STILL not done (goddamn), but I am down to "only" my books and office supplies (I think, there might still be a surprise lurking in one of those boxes), so I am optimistic I can get that done in the next few days. Ideally I'd like to finish that tomorrow evening when I get home, because I have to go to Ottawa back to my old house.

This is because, in Oh-My-God-There-Is-Still-Moving-Drama news, my old landlords have informed me that, even though I still technically live in the old place, they are going to start showing it to prospective tenants right away. Since it's currently a goddamned disaster in there, I am going to head out tomorrow as early as possible to try to at least tidy up all the garbage and crap that got left behind after the move, and fill up the car with some of the stuff I still want to bring to the new house. That was part of the plan for these coming two weeks anyway, but I had kind of assumed that I'd have more time to get the house pulled together before my landlords swooped in to get prospective new tenants who will likely be paying a LOT more rent than me. I don't like having to work on their timeline, but here we are, I guess. Here's hoping that I can get the house pulled together enough that they aren't going to try to gouge extra money out of me just because they can.

*lies on the floor*

My drama is so very low stakes compared to what's going on in the world, but it's very stressful on a personal level, I promise you. :P

Speaking of stressful, the poor quail had what one might call a Heckin' Escapade yesterday. KK took the dogs out before I got home from my night shift for their usual morning romp. What we didn't know is that Freeloader, the rooster whose life continues to be spared while we get settled in, had taken advantage of the door to his hutch not being latched properly (that one's on me) and gone walkabout (flapabout?). Apparently he hadn't gone far and was just bopping happily around in the grass, foraging away. At least he was, until the Brittanies got hold of him.

Fun fact about Brittanies, they are hunting dogs, specifically a versatile breed, meaning they both point AND retrieve, and because they are retrievers, they have what's called a "soft mouth," meaning that they will hold game birds in their mouths without biting down on them (because hunters don't want to have their birds chewed up by their dogs). Pixie grabbed Freeloader first and took off with him. KK forced her to drop him, only to have Peggy snatch him up immediately afterward. Poor Freeloader got exchanged from dog to dog a couple of times until KK was finally able to confiscate him and put him back in his hutch, where he hunkered down, the picture of wet, slobbery misery, but completely uninjured because the dogs were very gentle with him, comparatively speaking.

Honestly I fully expected him to die of shock, but he has hung in there until tonight, although he is a deeply unhappy and traumatized camper. I haven't heard him crow once since I got home, and he's usually extremely vocal. He has been eating and drinking, though, so I think there's no permanent harm done. And, well, he is going to get the metaphorical axe at some point, once I get my shit together.

Oh, and in the midst of all of this, the weight management clinic called today, and I am scheduled for the Pre-Surgery 2 class next Tuesday, and an in-person appointment with the surgeon on the following Thursday. That means that they are very likely ready to schedule me for surgery ASAP, which of course is something of a problem given that KK is having surgery in just over two weeks' time. OOPS. I'm sure that if I explain the situation they will be sure to schedule me further out, but my goodness, what ridiculous timing. I also have to go get more bloodwork done (so. much. bloodwork.) at the hospital, which means getting up at the asscrack of dawn so that I don't have to spend the entire day waiting in the hospital, because if you get there after 6:30am you have a guaranteed wait of at least two hours, if not three or four, and I for one do not want to spend half the day just waiting in a hospital for a blood draw. Blech. I have a lot of stuff to get done, after all.

I am torn between going tomorrow morning super early since I have to go to the house afterward anyway, or going on Friday. I think I might go tomorrow because that way it will light a fire under my ass and force me to do things. The only "problem" with that is that tomorrow is KK's in-office day, which means the dogs will be home alone for most of the day. But if I go stupidly early and get a lot of cleaning done before, say, noon, I might be able to get home by 2pm, which would get me here in time to dose Rika with her epilepsy meds AND be on time for my therapy appointment at 2:30 (did I mention I have a lot going on lately?). But in order to go tomorrow morning I will need to leave here at 5:30am to get to the hospital at 6:30, and, just, ugh. But it's for the greater good, I guess. Blargh.

And now, it's time for bed, especially if I need to be up in time to leave at 5:30. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

I managed about six hours of sleep today, which is more than I've averaged in the past few months, but I am still revoltingly tired. I got spoiled over the past couple of years of not working 12 hour shifts anymore, and got used to getting seven to eight hours a night far more regularly. I got used to not being nearly as sleep-deprived, and now I am paying for it, because I'm just not coping well with it at all. I used to be able to get things done even with next to no sleep in my system, but now it appears I can't get away with it anymore.

I either need to get more sleep or build my tolerance back up. I'd rather the former, but the way things are going it will probably have to be the latter.

I feel as though I don't have anything useful to say tonight, so this may be a short entry. I have ambitious (but hopefully not TOO ambitious) plans to spend the next two weeks getting the new house fully unpacked and the old house fully cleaned up. Since there's no air conditioning at the old house, my cunning plan is to check the weather ahead of time and to go on the days when it's coolest out so that I don't swelter to death while trying to get the place presentable again.

And in continuing The World Is On Fire news, there's been severe flooding in Texas, with 82 confirmed dead and the toll still rising. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on about why there wasn't more warning about the flooding, particularly from the National Weather Service. There are accusations that the huge cuts to the NWS are responsible for the lack of warning, but from what I can tell the NWS still managed to do its job in spite of all the cuts, so I'm not sure what's happening there. No matter which way you slice it, this is a horrific tragedy (especially since many of the victims are children), and it can be laid at the feet of the various administrations who've been blithely ignoring climate change for decades.

The wildfire season is going strong in the Western part of Canada, too. They had to close Kelowna Airport earlier today due to wildfire activity, but hopefully it won't remain closed long. At least we've had a fair bit of rain in my area in the past couple of weeks. It's kept things a bit cooler and allowed everything to grow, including, alas, my lawn. I have about 3.5 acres of lawn now (interspersed with trees and outbuildings), and no lawn mower except my tiny electric weed whacker, which is very obviously not up to that task. So on the list of things to do this week is acquire a riding lawn mower, hopefully at a reasonable price, because I am very quickly running out of money.

Speaking of which, I should fill out my time sheets so I can get paid for my shift work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: awake

My schedule is such that the week of night shifts has the unenviable feature of having the bulk of the week's hours scheduled in the last three days of the rotation. Because I work seven nights in a row and the weekend shifts are twelve hours long, it means I work thirty-two hours from Monday to Thursday, and then thirty-two hours from Friday to Sunday, and so that last weekend stretch is pretty brutal. The good news is that, since we are now early Sunday morning, I have made it past the halfway mark, and am now at roughly the 3/4 mark. Five-ish more hours left tonight, and then tomorrow's twelve hours, and then I am done!

Starting Monday morning, I will have two weeks to get my shit together before I go back to work, and sixteen days before KK's surgery is scheduled. That means getting the house fully unpacked and functional, but also getting to the old house in order as well. I need to bring over the rest of the stuff that's still there, get the place cleaned from top to bottom, and find someone to fix the walls in the basement that my cats damaged back in the day, and the wall that KK put a hole in when we were moving.

I also need to book my car to get my wheels aligned *again*, this time at Canadian Tire, at the suggestion of Steve the Wonder Mechanic. Hopefully they can get it done, unlike the dealership who were content to let the misalignment wreck my brand new winter tires and then gaslight me about it. If it does turn out that it can't be done, then I have to consider whether it's worth it to get the car fixed (the dealership quoted me about $6,000, which I think is inflated bullshit), or if I might finally have to bite the bullet and get myself a new or new-to-me car. I cannot emphasize enough how much I DO NOT WANT another car. 1) I love my Yaris. 2) I haven't had to make car payments in 9 years, which has been really good for my finances. Having to devote anywhere from $300 to $600 a month on car payments would take a serious chunk out of an already incredibly tight budget (I honestly don't know where I'd get the money), and I'd really rather not do that the same year I bought a freaking house.

God, being an adult sucks sometimes.

Because I'm on night shifts, I need to resist the temptation to draw up a Grand Plan(TM) for how I'm going to get everything done in the best and most perfect way in the next two weeks. My reach always exceeds my grasp, and then I just give up when things don't go to plan, which I can't actually afford. I need to get stuff done and can't let myself get paralyzed by whatever nonsense my brain decides to come up with in the meantime.

I don't want to curse myself, but so far tonight's shift has been on the calmer end of things. I've been listening to audiobooks again this month, after falling off the wagon for a couple of months. I started with the King's Lake mystery series, continuing with the stories that originally only starred D. C. Smith and which now feature most of the supporting cast from those novels. In the last couple of days I allowed myself to be "influenced" by advertising and started listening to a horror/mystery series called Oracle and narrated by Joshua Jackson, which has been surprisingly a lot more enjoyable than I thought they might be (which is why I'm still listening).

So on that note, I shall go back to my listening and wait for this night shift to finish. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: working

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.

Current Mood: calm

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!

Current Mood: optimistic

I am too old for this little sleep in a night. KK was still awake when I got home, so we ended up chatting for a while before I went to bed, so I only got about three hours of sleep before I had to get up and get ready for work again. Blaaaaargh.

The connectivity issue at work is resolved, at least, and the night shift surprised us by Jerry-rigging things together a bit and managing to log a bunch of the calls and emails from yesterday, thus sparing my current shift partner and I having to go through the entire backlog. So, yay for amazing colleagues! I have been mopping up the rest of the issues all morning with the help of my intrepid shift partner, and now we're back to our regular baseline.

I am hoping that the next few hours go by reasonably smoothly. I am very tired and I have very little desire to do a bunch of metaphorical heavy lifting. So far so good, so we shall see how it goes.

I have a few things to do when I get home, like send out Quaker announcements and feed and water the quail, but I plan on swan diving into my bed at the earliest opportunity otherwise. Hopefully I can "catch up" on some sleep that way. I know that technically there is no such thing as catching up on sleep, but I can't think of a better way to to describe it.

I have an appointment to take all four of my pets to the vet on Monday for their shots, so that's going to be a very expensive endeavour, but at least it will be done. We have plans to put all the pets in daycare at PetSmart on moving day so that they don't get traumatized and also so that they don't get underfoot or, in the case of the cats, get unduly traumatized by all of the goings-on. PetSmart won't take any pets that aren't fully up to date on their vaccinations (and rightly so!), so this is an expensive but necessary step.

I have been researching fencing for the new property, and Dylan and Sarah recommended against putting in chain link fence, especially if I want to try doing it myself. Apparently you need a specific piece of equipment to stretch chain link fencing, and it's a pain in the ass to install correctly. They suggested I get rolls of welded wire fencing and t-posts instead, which is much easier for a beginner to install. I looked up the prices, and it looks like I might be able to get it all done for about $1,000, rather than the $3,000 to $9,000 that it would cost to pay someone to put up the roughly 300 feet of fencing I'll be needing. I do need to figure out how to build a gate for that kind of fence, since I'd want at least one or maybe two access points (one at the front, one toward the back so I can easily get to the rest of the property), but I'm sure that can be managed. My main fear is that it will prove to be beyond my ability and then I'll have wasted a bunch of money for nothing, but I figure nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The fence will have to be a weekend project, and in the meantime I will be keeping the dogs contained (I hope) by the expedient means of a clotheline and tie-outs. It seems to work pretty well for Dylan and Sarah, but their dogs are not nearly as prone to escaping as mine. We shall see. They definitely won't be allowed outside unsupervised until such time as I am confident they won't go careening onto the neighbours' property or permanently vanish into the wilderness chasing after the wildlife.

Okay, time to get back to work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

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!

Current Mood: busy

Yes, I am absolutely writing this post during my work hours. Shh. More seriously, I don't think my boss cares particularly what I do as long as my work gets completed promptly and accurately, so I'm safe on that front. Today so far hasn't been a super busy day. Currently the only important thing going on is some ongoing tests for a distress alert on a specific vessel, and while that requires me to be responsive, it's not particularly labour intensive. I am most of the way through my shift, and rather looking forward to going home.

I'm writing my update early today in the hopes of shaving off the time spent on it in the evening. Yesterday, after I finished writing I went upstairs and got sort of waylaid by KK who had approximately seven thousand things she wanted to discuss, and the next thing I knew it was 11:30pm and all my good intentions about going to bed early had gone out the window. KK is very much a night owl, but I am not, and I cannot function on that little sleep. To be fair, neither can she, but she has fewer negative consequences for it than I do. For instance, her workplace is pretty tolerant of her taking a mid-work nap, whereas where I work we don't even get a lunch break. If she oversleeps then she can choose to work from home that day and make it up another day, but I have people waiting for me to take over their operations desk, so I can't afford to oversleep or be late.

So I am trying to lessen the number of things to do right before bed, and updating my little daily blog is one of them. I still want to keep writing a little bit every day, so really it will just depend on what else I have going on that day: what shift I'm working, what other errands and chores I have planned, etc. I have technically broken my streak once, on the Saturday I got the quail, and that's only because I got home so late and then had to set up the quail in their new home, that by the time I got around to updating it was already technically Sunday. Oops. I decided that didn't count, because in shift-work logic, it's not the next day until you've gone to sleep and woken up again. :P

The second night with the CPAP went a little less well. I was perhaps a bit less tired than the day before, due to working from home, and so I was more aware of the mask being on my face during the night. The head strap was also a little loose and kept shifting up on my head, so I awoke a couple of times to pull it back down. Overall, though, the night went by fine, and tonight I will tighten the strap and hope it dos the trick. The CPAP noted that I had something like 1.2 events per hour, which is even better than yesterday, so I'm counting it a win.

I have lost the habit of meal planning for the week, and really need to start that up again. I don't have a plan for tonight yet. I am going to skip making ground chicken to spare me and KK the same thing for a million days in a row, but otherwise I haven't thought it through at all. I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something on the fly, but I saved myself a lot of time and hassle and mental bandwidth by planning ahead. I also have a lot of stuff in our freezers I'd like to get through before we move, so that I don't have to worry about moving that much frozen food over a long distance on the same day. I will have to especially focus on the large chest freezer and see what I can get rid of in there (there are a few things KK brought with her that I've never touched that I'm pretty sure she's forgotten about entirely) and what I can cook up in the next few weeks so that I can then empty it completely and then defrost it in anticipation of the move. We won't be able to get through everything that's in all the chest freezers, because I purposefully built up our food reserves to last for three to four months, but I think I can get it to a more manageable level for the move.

I am determined to find a ladder and get over myself about packing for the move this weekend. I've been meaning to pack the living room area for a week now, and keep not doing it, so I'm changing tactics. This weekend I shall pack up the basement, or as much of it as I can humanly manage. The good news is that a lot of it is already in Rubbermaid bins, so realistically all I have to do is label them and stack them neatly. I plan on dismantling most of the shelving, and getting as much of it squared away in order to make room for more packing boxes. The only thing I won't be able to pack away right off is my computer and computer desk, and the latter won't fit in the new house. I don't know yet if I'm going to try to hang onto it and maybe set it up in the little workshop area, or if I should sell it or give it away. It's pretty new (I got it in 2021) and it's a really good computer desk. However, it won't fit in my new bedroom (again, 9 feet by 9 feet is not the most spacious of areas), even if I install a Murphy bed. I may be absolutely crazy, but I could try installing an adult-appropriate loft bed (i.e. one that won't break my back and has some sort of shelf system that would serve as a night stand), but then that would definitely preclude having my parents overnight. With even a double Murphy bed I can give them my room for the night and sleep on a cot in the living room, but most loft beds are twin sized, and my 87 year old mother with a a bad hip certainly can't manage a ladder or steps even if did find one that was a size or two larger.

Argh. Logistics.

In a few years I would like to build a "Bunkie" on the property, which is basically a glorified shed, and I'd probably turn that either into guest quarters or into a home office for myself, but that's a pretty big purchase and certainly not one I can afford right now. So the problem of the desk remains. I may be able to wrap it securely in plastic and store it in the garage for that mythical future date when I can use it again, which is a decision unto itself. Am I just hoarding, or am I hanging onto an item with genuine future use? WHO KNOWS. The same desk costs about twice as much now as when I bought it thanks to inflation, and now that tariffs and trade wars are happening, that new price may double or even triple by the time I would buy another desk, and it might not be as good. Am I just dealing with a scarcity mindset or being fiscally prudent? GOOD QUESTION.

So, yes, welcome to Thinking About Packing With Phnee. It's like packing, only a lot less productive and lot more anxiety-ridden. :P

Okay, time to get back to work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: restless

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!

Current Mood: optimistic

I think I am paying for all of the "lack" of sleep from the past few weeks. Today was lost to feeling like absolute garbage most of the day. I have two more sleeps until I go to the sleep specialist on Monday morning and probably get told that I need a CPAP, and then the plan is to get ahold of a local CPAP provider as soon as humanly possible, because I am so tired of feeling tired. Right now would be the perfect time for a bit of extra energy, too, as I have to pack up the house.

I have been trying to get through the industrial quantity of borscht I made last Thursday, and it's officially down to a dull roar. I will have some left over for work next week, too, which is nice, as long as I don't spill it on my clothes. I have yet to find a reliable way to get beet juice stains out of clothing.

I have Quaker Meeting tomorrow, and after that I may work on de-cluttering my bedroom in anticipation of packing things. I am slowly trying to convince myself that I should part with my dining room set, which I've had for 16 years now and was my first "grown-up" purchase when I joined the RCMP. I love it so much, but there is nowhere to put it in the new house. There's no dining room to speak of, and the kitchen has a huge built-in island/table thing. I kind of want to just wrap all of it securely in plastic and store it in one of the outbuildings on the off chance that one day we'll have enough money to put an extension on the house, but that's probably super unrealistic.

Actually, since the garage will eventually have to be torn down, I am mentally toying with the idea of creating a secondary residence, like an in-law suite, with whatever building we end up putting there. I was thinking perhaps a quonset hut would be useful since they're not super expensive and can be adapted to any number of uses. I want to put in essentially a fully functioning guest house, with bedroom(s), bathroom, kitchenette, etc. But that's a huge and expensive project that is for a future me who hasn't just spent all her money buying a house. ;)

Man, I am doing a terrible job of convincing myself I don't need a dining room set. :P

I have so many plans, and so little free money with which to implement them. I do love building castles in Spain, though, it's one of my favourite hobbies, because it's completely free. Eventually I'd love to build a fully functional outdoor kitchen or maybe just a summer kitchen, one in which I can do large-scale processing of fruit and vegetables and meat. Having either a summer kitchen or an outdoor kitchen would make things a bit easier, because it's extremely hot work and it turns the house into an absolute oven, even with air conditioning.

Of course, I have some immediate expenses I have to figure out as well right after the move. We need fencing for the dogs, and the house needs gutters in order to not, oh, rot from the bottom up over time. I can afford one of those two things right away, but very likely not both, unless I can manage to get one done remarkably cheaply. *sigh* Being an adult is difficult.

Okay, once again, it is time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: calm

We got the house! *giddy dancing*

Today has been an absolute tidal wave of documents to sign: the waiver for the conditions, the representation agreement for my real estate agent (because our old one expired--oops!), a couple of minor counter-offers from the sellers about the exact closing date and a request to keep their loft beds, which I gladly accepted. I then had to contact one of the lawyers recommended by my real estate agent, and I will have to pay out a truly staggering amount of money for that particular service (as well as land transfer fees and the like).

I am very excited!

I also immediately began panicking about how much packing there is to do before we move. The new closing date, instead of being June 4th, is now May 26th. That means we have exactly six weeks and four days to pack up this nightmare of a hoarders' house before then. Of course we won't be moving on the closing date itself, but since that week is my week off from work it only makes sense to move sometime during that week so that I don't have to take extra time off work to make it happen.

Right now I'm in the initial planning stages of the packing. Mostly my concern is that I have nowhere in this house to use as a staging area for boxes the way I normally do, because there's just no room anywhere anymore. Previously I would have used the living room, but KK will likely not put up with that sort of thing for six weeks, so I'll have to come up with something else. I don't really want to use the basement, which is already kind of full, and it means navigating the stairs with a lot of boxes, both taking them down and then bringing them back up, because I can all but guarantee that movers won't want to navigate my death stairs any more than absolutely necessary, but I think it may end up being my best bet.

I want to break the house down into "zones" that I will give myself a certain number of days each to pack up, and hope I'm not woefully underestimating the amount of time it will take to pack everything. I know for instance that the kitchen is going to take much longer to pack up than I anticipate, because that's what ALWAYS happens when I pack up a kitchen. There are too many small bits and bobs, and wrapping up fragile plates and cups is fiddly and time consuming, so I need to give myself at least a week to pack that up. The basement and the garage are currently nightmares (especially the garage, oh God), but I might do as I've done in the past and rent a small U-Haul van and move a bunch of the gardening tools and other things that aren't as easy to pack into boxes myself.

Okay, all that stress has tired me out. :P Time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: cheerful

I cannot keep my eyes open. Today was the big push in with the professional organizer, in which we moved around all the furniture to make space in the kitchen, and it turned out that my idea was a good one. There is a lot more space in there now, even though we're not finished and won't be until tomorrow afternoon. My body is protesting HARD and reminding me that sure, round might be a shape, but it's not necessarily the most advantageous shape for doing consistent physical labour. I was up and down the stairs a lot today and on my knees a fair bit scrubbing the baseboards after moving the furniture around. It's honestly amazing how much grime builds up over time behind furniture. Right now almost every part of me is either sore or throbbing or both.

In house hunting news, it's a busy time of year for real estate, so there's a lot of scrambling to find a house inspector (my usual guy, Mike, is unfortunately not available) and to get my mortgage approved. I need extra paperwork for arcane real estate reasons, mostly to prove that I'm not a criminal mastermind shoddily laundering money through this random real estate purchase or something. It's all extremely bureaucratic and annoying, and extra stressful because I only have until Tuesday to get it all together.

If the house does become a reality, the next 60 days are going to be incredibly busy. I will have to find movers and pack up the house. I will leave KK to pack up her room and her office stuff, but I think packing up the rest of the house will mostly default to me because I am the more able-bodied of the two of us. Like, last night KK asked me to bring up a sofa cover from the basement, so I did, thinking she was going to replace the old one, but no, tonight she asked me why I hadn't done it. (The answer is because I didn't have time between cooking dinner last night, driving her to work this morning, working with the professional organizer until 1pm, dealing with mortgage things afterward, and finally going to pick her up at work before starting dinner again.) She seemed super puzzled that I somehow hadn't had time to do it, even though she napped on the sofa the entire time I was preparing dinner. Anyway, it got done and we're none the worse for it, but I will admit I was a bit snippy about it. Now, it's theoretically not KK's problem that I have decided to reorganize the kitchen and have therefore been extra busy and tired, but also she's never expected me to change the sofa cover for her when she's capable of doing it herself.

I have nodded off three times writing even this. I will come back tomorrow with a hopefully longer update. Good night, friends!

Current Mood: sore

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).

I had a semi-productive day. KK asked me Friday night to help her move furniture when I got home so that we could launch the Roomba in the living room. Now, moving furniture after a night shift is not my first choice, but if KK is in the mood for cleaning, I am the last person to say no. So, when I got home, I cleared out the entire living room (except for the ottoman, because it’s big enough that it would block off too much of the downstairs before KK could come down with the dogs) and gave the floor a preliminary sweep. The Roomba is great, but it cannot compete with the dust capybaras in our house (they are too big to qualify as dust bunnies) since we hadn’t let it do its thing in a couple of weeks. I’m thinking of naming it Pete (the king of the rumba beat!), but I’m not fully sold on that name yet.

I also invested in a body pillow in the hopes that it will help with the eventual CPAP (I’m a side sleeper and I am a little concerned about the mask not fitting right) and also with the lower back pain that insists on coming and going. If I want to get my community garden plot set up right and not wreck my back the way I did last year, I’m going to have to be extra careful about managing it. I should look up my old physio exercises and start doing those again (blech), and maybe I’ll even set up some appointments to get a jump on this. Last year I hurt my back so badly that I was out of commission for weeks, and the entire garden plot went to hell in a handbasket. This year I would like it to be different. Anyway, the body pillow is less amazing than I was hoping for, but it might just need some extra getting used to.

In other news, my real estate agent has sent us a listing that checks off some of our boxes. It doesn’t have much land, and the neighbours are very close, but the house itself looks like it could fit us, it has some nice looking out buildings and is at a pretty reasonable distance from Ottawa. It would require some downsizing, for sure, but I think it could be workable. I’ll know for sure once we’ve had a chance to see it, which will be on Monday after KK is done with work. Originally, we were going to go tomorrow, but there’s an actual ice storm predicted for tomorrow, so the real estate agent rescheduled us for Monday.

I’m a little concerned about the ice storm, actually. There have been multiple severe weather alerts about it. For one, I am not thrilled at the idea of having to drive to and from work in that kind of weather. For another, I don’t currently have gas for the generator in the garage. I had gas stored but the ADHD struck and I kind of forgot about it, so now it’s too old to use safely. It would just gunk up the mechanism. So, if the power does go out I’ll need to buy a new container from Canadian Tire and fill it up that way, and I’m a little concerned that most of the people around here will be thinking along the same lines. For all my attempts at preparedness, I am apparently kind of unprepared for this current storm.

*sigh*

I need to get back into the swing of things, preparedness-wise. I have to fill the water containers in the basement and acquire more containers. My original plan was to have at least two weeks’ worth of emergency supplies: food, water, and basic energy. In terms of water storage, the rule of thumb is to have four litres of water per person per day, and then of course you have to take into account the pets. I had to do some math because the amount of water per day per pets is done in ounces per pound of body weight and came up with a total of three litres of water for all of the mammals in the house. The frogs also need distilled water, but we actually have a fair bit of that already stored up for them, and they go through less than a litre a week, so I’m not too worried about their water needs. So basically, we need a minimum of 11 litres of water per day, which is a little over half of each container that I’ve bought. I currently have four containers, so that would mean we’d have enough potable water for seven days, eight if we ration a little bit. In order to have at least two weeks’ worth of potable water I need three to four more containers, which is totally doable, albeit on the expensive side. Ideally, I would have enough water to last even longer than that, but two weeks’ worth seems like a good start.

The other thing I’ve been slacking on is figuring out shelf-stable emergency food supplies. The thing about stocking up on food is that you have to make sure that you will actually be able to eat whatever you’re stocking up on. As an example, I bought some canned chicken a while back, and it turns out the texture is super disgusting. This is what makes me laugh about the supposedly “hardcore” preppers: here they are buying 20 kilos of dried beans or nuts with no thought as to whether they or their family even LIKE beans or know how to cook them in a way that won’t make them want to slit their wrists after a week or two of eating the same thing over and over. Like, sure, you can stuff your bomb shelter full of canned beans and MREs, but then that’s all you’re going to be eating forever. Often enough these people also don’t know that they should be rotating through their food supply.

There’s also the question of how to cook it if you have no electricity. Back when I had a gas stove (God, I miss living in my old house, even if the landlady was crazy) this wasn’t an issue, but my current stove is electric. I did acquire a thermos shuttle chef a couple of years ago, so I should definitely practice making food in it so that I’m not caught off-guard when the power goes off. It’s actually pretty clever as a concept: you put food in it, bring it to a boil over a heat source, then place it in a larger “sleeve” for several hours, and it cooks the food over that time without using extra energy. It’s mostly good for things like stews, especially ones that incorporate a starch, like rice or noodles. KK isn’t a hue fan of stews due to the varying texture of the contents, but she can tolerate them reasonably well, and I know that in an emergency when we have no electricity, she’d be okay with that as a form of nourishment, which is encouraging.

I still have a lot of concerns about how to shelter in place if there’s a long-term power outage or a larger emergency that’s also accompanied by a power outage. My main concern is the dart frogs. They require controlled temperatures (between 18 and 25 degrees Celsius) and are pretty delicate, so anything outside those temperatures can kill them. They’re also pretty hard to transport, so if we have to evacuate, I will be facing a similar problem. At least at home I can keep them in their vivarium, but in the winter they could easily freeze and in the summer they could just as easily boil to death when the temperatures reach extremes.

I do need to invest in a few more shelf-stable food items, particularly peanut butter and maybe crackers or melba toast or something. Bread isn’t shelf-stable, but I can probably get away with making a flatbread of some kind if I have a heat source for cooking. I probably wouldn’t have enough heat to bake a loaf of bread, but I can at least generate enough to make flatbread. I tried making tortillas a couple of years ago and they didn’t turn out especially well, but I could definitely practice that skill. I’ve been meaning to practice more skills on a regular basis, but the no-longer-mystery tired has been keeping me in a vicious cycle of doing the bare minimum, collapsing from exhaustion while everything piles up, then trying to do more, exhausting myself more, and then being exhausted while watching everything pile up even more. Meow. Anyway, I am cautiously hopeful that if the CPAP works, I will finally be able to catch up on all the stuff I have been letting get out of hand all around me without constantly feeling like I want to crawl into bed for the next thousand years.

All right. Time to wrap up my musings and dive back into the books I brought with me. I got interrupted a fair bit on this post, so now I am pas the halfway mark of this shift. Four hours and forty-five minutes left until I’m done for the day. I am really looking forward to this week being over. For one, I’d really like to get some sleep, and for two, I am excited about the professional organizer coming over to fix my kitchen! Anyway, I shall now dive into The Care Manifesto until either more work comes in or it’s time to go home. If I finish it I still have two other books, including a new Mediterranean Diet air fryer cookbook which I hope will provide some inspiration.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

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