Corner of Bourbon & Division

I did absolutely fuck-all today. I slept until just past 10:00 (it was blissful), and then caught up on Critical Role, and hung out with the cats.

Oh, wait, I DID put in a bottom blade roast to cook in the crockpot. Otherwise? Nada.

No one from work called (halle-fucking-lujah), and I only got a single phone call from one of the ladies from Quaker Meeting about a poetry/art/music website she's putting together with her committee. She wants me to be one of the "gatekeepers" for submissions to the website, and the last time we spoke about it I asked her what sort of guidelines there were and got met with crickets. So now there are better guidelines in place, and I guess I will start keeping an eye out for submissions. I don't anticipate a huge amount  of traffic, anyway, as it's a pretty niche little website.

It's far too late for an "early to bed" resolution, but given that I went to bed at a very reasonable hour yesterday and slept for nearly 11 hours, I think I'm okay as long as I don't push it too far tonight.

Tomorrow I have Meeting at 10:00, then I need to pick up the car from the car vet, and pick up Peggy from puppy boot camp. I missed having my little tornado around this week, not going to lie. It's good for both of us for her to get training and lots of extra exercise, but I think we're both happier when we're together. It will be nice to have her back.

Hey hey, I have successfully been on this earth for 42 of its rotations around the sun! For this year I can claim to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And yes, I know where my towel is.

 I am starting this post much later than I intended due to a slightly late day at work followed by a Skype call with my parents (for my birthday, of course), so I don't know how much detail I'll get into. Maybe the post will get away from me, the way they are sometimes wont to do.

In my mind I'm sort of splitting things up into projects, goals, and habits. They're all going to be kind of intertwined anyway, because building habits allows you to work on projects and attain goals, but whatever. It's all still a bit of an amorphous mess. I often do a lot of my "processing" by either  talking or writing things out, because things are always clearer outside my head than in, so don't be surprised if that's what ends up happening here.

( Resolutions and Plans )

And that's it! There's a lot there, but I'm not planning an overnight 100% overhaul of myself. My therapist likes to tell me that it's important to approach things with the mentality of a scientist and treat everything like an experiment. Hypothesis, test, conclusion. Lather, rinse, repeat until you find what works. It's a process, and I am excited to get started.

The children didn't turn up until very late today for First Day School, so I got to sit in Meeting for almost half an hour instead of trying to wrangle them all. It also turned out to be only one out of the sibling set of three, the cooperative eight-year-old, so it worked out in my favour, since I only had to entertain her for about twenty minutes. We made gluten-free Rice Krispy squares, which turned out reasonably well (somehow mine always turn out super fluffy instead of dense the way I'm accustomed to them being when other people make them).

It worked out well for me, since I slept pretty badly last night and was not really in any kind of shape to chase after the older boy today. I spent all night waking up from nightmares induced by playing way too much 7 Days to Die with my friend V. I'm doing much better in the game now, although I'm still not very good at it. Yesterday we played up until just past the "Blood Moon," when the zombies in the game all swarm and go berserk and try extra hard to kill you, and we made a mistake trying to secure our temporary shelter. We thought we were safe, and suddenly we were being overrun from almost all sides and it was all extremely stressful. So my subconscious took hold of that and ran with it all freaking night long. Thanks, brain. :P

Otherwise, Meeting went well. Today was potluck day, and I met several new people. Two were visiting from a Meeting near Philadelphia (lots and lots of Old Quaker Families™ there), and the others were new attenders, so I tried to be as welcoming and not-overwhelming as possible with them. They seem really nice, and so I hope they decide to come back. My Clearness Committee was there, too (minus one member), to meet up and finalize their report for next Sunday's Meeting for Worship for Business.

For those of you unfamiliar with Quaker process, I applied to officially become a Member of the Meeting last month (I submitted a letter to the Meeting which was read out loud at Meeting for Business by the Clerk), and they decided that I should then take the next step, which was to meet with a Clearness Committee, which in my case consists of three people. There's no set number of people, but it's usually 3-4, I think, unless the Meeting is too small to accommodate that number. A Clearness Committee is there to help an aspiring Member discern whether their Leading is truly to become a Member, or whether they need to wait and learn some more, or maybe even reconsider.

Leadings and discernment are another big part of the Quaker process: everything is done with great deliberation, which I must confess appeals to me a lot. It will not surprise most of you when I say that I myself am not a person who makes decisions easily: I tend to weigh as many sides of a question as possible before coming to a conclusion, and the more important a decision, the longer it will take me. That's not to say that I can make small decisions quickly—just ask anyone who's ever gone out to a restaurant with me. :P

I met with my Clearness Committee last Wednesday, while I was in the midst of Landlady Woes™. We arranged to meet at someone else's house, since one of the members of my committee is allergic to dogs. We spent nearly two hours talking, during which they asked me lots of questions about my spiritual path, and why I was drawn to the Quaker community to begin with. It was very intense, and all three women on my committee are very passionate about this, which made for a great conversation. One of them, amusingly enough, kept coming to my "defence," as the other two kept getting excitable and interrupting me. She kept telling them to let me finish my sentences, which was almost as distracting as the interruptions themselves. Eventually I had to—nicely—tell her that it was okay, that I could advocate for myself if I really needed it, and we ended up having a laugh over it. All in all, I thought it went very well, and I'm curious to see what they've put in their report.

And that concludes this week's adventures.

 Sorry I haven't posted in a few days, I got super busy with various commitments and didn't have the time to sit at the computer and compose an entry to talk about all of it. It's been a busy week, and it doesn't look like it's about to get any less busy any time soon.

I visited with L. and J. (well, only L., but I met J. later), the lesbian couple being harassed by their neighbours. They are just the most adorable people, and what they are going through is horrific. It's been taking place for years now, and it's not an exaggeration to say it has ruined their lives. Not permanently, but right now they can't even have a semblance of normalcy. It's not just verbal harassment, either. They've been assaulted on a couple of occasions, and it sounds like the police have been treating this as a neighbour dispute rather than a clear case of harassment/hate crimes. I am livid on their behalf, because it sounds like the entire case has been badly mishandled from the start. Unfortunately, the situation is beyond salvaging now, not without their putting in time and money and energy that they simply don't have, and I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with it any longer. 

We're setting up a tentative schedule for me to go hang out at their house once a week starting in early February (my schedule isn't free until then, unfortunately), and with any luck they'll be able to sell their house soon and move to a place where they can start fresh.

The rest of the week was taken up with cleaning the house, hosting a potluck for the young Quakers, and work. Oh, and making sandwiches for a Quaker wedding today (which I was unable to attend, due to work, alas). It feels like I haven't had a moment to myself all week, which isn't true, since I actually got to stay home most of Wednesday and just chill. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been had I not had at least one day to myself to do not much.

Tomorrow was supposed to be my one day off before I start a week of training, but of course my landlady has decided to make my life hard again. She's insisting on twelve post-dated cheques (and wanted them two weeks before the first of the month, no less!), so I pushed back a little, and so now we're signing a new twelve-month lease. I refuse to give post-dated cheques for a month-to-month lease, and at least this way I'm slightly more protected than before, although it means a commensurate increase in my rent, which is going to hurt. *sigh* I can't win with her, and it means I have to put up with her in my home for an extended amount of time tomorrow, instead while we sign a new lease. Bleh. Still, it could be worse, and I hope it won't take too long.

I'm going to call it an early night tonight. I've poked at my Romanian lessons a bit, and now that I know how to say "cow" I feel like my life is just that bit more complete. ;) Tomorrow I'll go to Meeting, then come back to deal with the landlady, and maybe after that I'll have a bit of peace and quiet before work starts up again on Monday.

I will say that the highlight of today has been watching the Women's Marches taking place all over the world. It gives me hope, even as fascism soars to new heights to the south of us.

I have so much to write about that I feel a little overwhelmed. I know, I know, some people would really like to have my problems. I keep wondering if I should write about all of it at once and let future entries worry about themselves, or if I should try spacing things out a little bit. In the end I decided to start typing and let the chips fall where they may. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Migrating my entries to Dreamwidth and then posting from there has reminded me of the difficulties of crossposting from DW, which is why I stopped doing it to begin with. Not difficulties, per se. I guess "inconveniences" is a better term. All of my stuff is on LiveJournal: my tags, my photographs, and of course my icons. I've had a permanent LJ account since 2003, while my DW account is a free one, and I am not *quite* ready to pay for a service I'm not sure I'll be using on a regular basis. On DW I only have six icons or so, which does make it easier to pick one, but limits my selection considerably. I can always go change the icon manually on LJ afterward, of course, but it's an extra step that I hadn't taken into account. Not the end of the world, like I said, but nonetheless somewhat inconvenient. So I fervently hope that this is all a tempest in a teapot and that LJ will carry on as it has for many years, with glitches and outages here and there, but nonetheless steady.

I've tried to work out how to transfer my pictures, and haven't found a way. I suppose I'll have to do it manually at some point. I lost all my original icons during one of my many hard drive adventures (alas), but I can at least download what LJ kept, I suppose. I'll add that to my ever-growing to-do list.

Aside from my non-post yesterday, I've at least been doing okay with my "post once a day" resolution. So far, anyway. I never did come back with my feelings about Rogue One, but let me assure you, there are many. Many, many feelings. All of them sad. SPOILERS AHEAD: ( Spoilers behind the cut )
So there, those are my thoughts on the movie.

Tomorrow I have Meeting for Worship, and the plan is to hand in my letter of intent, requesting to become an official Member of the Meeting. Right now I'm an Attender only, but I had been planning on requesting membership last year. I didn't for a few reasons, and now seems like as good a time as any to pick up where I left off. I wrote an uncharacteristically (for me) short letter, mostly because I didn't know what to write, and I'll be giving it to the Clerk tomorrow, in order for my request to be brought to Meeting For Business, which is next week. If it has to wait for next month, so be it, but at least then it will be out of my hands. I am a little nervous about this, but I am trying to get my act together on a number of fronts, and this is one of them. 

Tomorrow I'm also leading First Day School. Since it's sort-of-kind-of the first Sunday of the month (not really, but we're pretending it is), it's Potluck Sunday, which means the children help prepare a dessert for potluck. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to cook or bake with children knows that this means the adult in charge has about ten times the amount of work to do, but the kids love it, and it means I don't have to come up with a curriculum-based activity for them. I'm still pretty shaky when it comes to being able to talk about religious/Quaker themes with the children, although we once had a really great (but accidental) conversation about Quaker themes in How To Train Your Dragon. Cooking or baking with the kids means the added complication of needing to meet a lot of specific dietary requirements: one child is gluten-free, and since it's a kids' activity I make sure that it's also nut-free, which suddenly reduces our possibilities by quite a wide margin. So far I've done apple "biscuits" (cutting apples into discs and decorating them), fruit skewers, and gluten-free Rice Krispie Squares.

I am honestly starting to run out of ideas, but tomorrow we'll be making "peanut butter" cookies using Wow Butter (it's soy-based and tastes pretty much exactly like peanut butter, which flummoxes me to this day), sugar, and an egg. Three ingredients, no gluten, no nuts. Any of the parents who object to egg or sugar can bite me, which is, admittedly, not a very Christian sentiment. ;) 

I have other thoughts, mostly about writing/not-writing, but perhaps I will indeed save those for the next post. Or never, depending on how chicken I'm feeling about writing about writing.

November has arrived again, with its customary dip in my energy levels. I'm experimenting with being off Facebook and Twitter again, after a successful one-month hiatus in May. This time I'm not enjoying it as much. I took a break in May because those platforms were making me a little crazy, but right now I'm finding that I feel more isolated from my friends and community than anything else. Maybe November isn't a good time of year for introspection. At least in May it's sunny and the days are longer.

Apart from that, my news is mostly good. I got the promotion I applied for, despite the fact that I thought I was by far the least likely of the candidates to get it. Apparently I got a bit lucky. There were four of us applying for two positions. The girl I thought was most qualified got one of the positions. Two guys also applied from outside our section, but one of them withdrew without my knowing, and the other one, by all accounts, had a bad day when he interviewed. He'd applied before and been passed over in favour of a more qualified applicant, and it seems that he came to this new interview with something of a surly attitude as a result. My boss told me that it had showed that I'd come prepared, and that I had done really well, so no one on the interview panel doubted for a moment that I should get one of the two open positions.

So, in short, promotion! YAY! Also, in related good news, fully 75% of the supervisor positions in my section are now staffed by women. Go us! The three of us also get along like a house on fire, so it's going to be so much fun to work with them. I'm excited. :)

I'm also going to be spending the next four weeks training to perform a completely new set of functions at work, unrelated to my new supervisory role. Well, sort of related, but I would have had to learn them anyway, regardless of the outcome of the promotion process. That means four week of an almost bourgeois schedule of working 06:00 to 14:00, Monday to Friday. It will be very interesting to see if I can deal with working five days in a row with only the weekend in between for four weeks. I've been working shifts for eight years now, it feels weird to be going back to a "regular" work day, however briefly.

By the way, we are horrifically short-staffed at my office, and we will likely soon be opening up new jobs (again). If you or anyone you know is a Canadian citizen with a high school education or higher, good computer skills, and a more than basic grasp of French (you need to be functional but not fluent), and you want to come work for some great bosses (myself included, now!), drop me a line! I will send you the application information the moment the jobs open again. :)

I've also been nominated to become the Clerk for the First Day School of the local Quaker Meeting. It sounds more glamorous than it is. ;) Basically it just means I'd be responsible for herding the cats in order to keep FDS running smoothly. First Day School is the kids' program at Meeting, a bit like Sunday School, only a lot less formal. There's singing and crafts and occasionally lessons about what it means to be a Quaker/Friend. Honestly, I'm still learning myself how to be a Quaker, so I feel ill-equipped to be the Clerk, but most of the FDS Committee have been there for years, and they're all burnt out. So I've agreed to take the helm, and two of them will be mentoring me until I get the hang of it.

Technically I'm still an Attender at the Meeting, not an official member. I've started doing some reading to become more informed, and the more I learn the less I feel I know. I think that's sort of normal, at least at first. I don't want to ask to become a Member before I feel like I know what I'm doing. The Religious Society of Friends has had a long and rich written tradition, letters and essays and diaries, and there is a lot of history to go through. I basically know absolutely nothing of the complexity and nuance of thinking that evolved over the centuries to bring the Quakers to where they are today. So, that's one of my current projects right now.

The adoption project has slowed to a crawl while we sort out paperwork. I need to get a police check done to prove that I have no criminal record (yes, you may all laugh now) and no history of abuse toward children or anyone or anything else (go on, laugh harder). Also, even though I've been stable and not medicated for nine years, they want my former psychiatrist to sign off on my mental health. So I've been jumping through hoops trying to get him to answer his damned phone. He's moved to a private practice, and I've already left messages several times. His secretary assures me he'll call back "when he gets the chance," but it's been three weeks, so I'm a little irked. I realise I'm not a current or paying client, but sheesh. Once all those papers are in order, I'll find out whether or not I've been accepted as a potential candidate. If I'm accepted, things will proceed as they are right now. If not, I am toying with a Plan B, which I will explore more in depth if needs be. I'm not thinking about it too much right now, as it involves a pretty drastic life change, which won't happen at all if I end up on the waiting list for kids.

In the interim, I've been spending my free time returning to the gym, playing video games on the computer, and watching probably way too much TV for my own good, even though I've become even pickier about what shows I like to watch. The trouble is that, even if I'm picky, there's still a lot of enjoyable programs available, especially once you have both cable and Netflix. Yes, I caved and got cable, because my DSL internet provider, despite promising speeds of "up to" 30 Mbps, never delivered anything above 300 Kbps, and it was rather frustrating to pay for a service I wasn't getting. So I coughed up extra money for much better internet, and got a land line and cable TV out of the deal, too, which really isn't half bad.

The rest of tonight's plans involve sacking out on the sofa with the cats, the dog at my feet, and the latest episode of Sleepy Hollow (or maybe Elementary, I haven't decided yet). Then it will be bedtime. In fact, it will be past bedtime, as I am now old and boring and am usually in bed by 21:00 these days. Kids, lawn, etc.

How's everyone else in LJ land doing? Let me know!

Went to Meeting, and was amazed at how wonderful it felt to go in, sit in silence, and just be for an hour. I didn't try to meditate or even focus my thoughts, since I'm waaaay out of practice. I just let my mind wander where it wanted to, until all the static and white noise that had built up over the last few weeks slowly drained away. There was no instant of clarity or anything, but it was good.

There were only five of us there, and we had tea and chatted after Meeting. They all remembered me, even though I hadn't been in over six months, which was really nice.

Then it was off to coffee with my friend Alex. He's one of the few people with whom I can pick up where we left off, even if it's been years. We've both grown and evolved as people, but we recognize that in each other, respect it, and are still good friends nonetheless (unlike other friends from high school, from whom I've had to distance myself because they're stuck in 1995 and still think it's okay to treat me like a doormat with poor self-esteem, which hasn't been the case for me for over ten years: I don't allow toxic friends into my entourage anymore).

He had a previous dinner engagement, so we had to cut the evening short, but it was great to see him again.

Tonight I will be putting away the groceries I bought (emergency rations only, and I just realized I forgot something important, which I guess I'll have to get tomorrow: bah), watching some Stargate: Atlantis, and going to bed. Tomorrow I shall get up early and do some tidying.

Life is good. :)