mousme | Entries tagged with sleep

1- State of the Phnee

I’m back in the saddle, more or less. I am having trouble getting myself going in the mornings still, and I have to figure out either how to manage my life without getting up early, or else how to get myself out of bed at a reasonable time. I have not figured out either of those things. It’s partly inertia and partly a feeling of being constantly worn out. I was hoping that solving the mystery tired/sleep apnea thing would also solve the can’t-get-out-of-bed problem, but nope, turns out that wasn’t it.

I have to confess that I live with a constant background noise of vague frustration and annoyance that I am apparently immune to all the “life-changing” miracles of modern medicine that everyone swears by. People swear that ADHD medication allowed them to focus and get things done, that using a CPAP made them miraculously no longer tired and cleared up their brain fog lickety-split. It’s all amazing stuff that will change your life! Except I have not experienced any of this. The CPAP does help, in that I have noticed that I feel noticeably worse if I don’t use it, but I don’t feel noticeably better or more energized day to day. I’ve taken almost every ADHD medication under the sun except for straight-up Ritalin and Adderall (because my doctor doesn’t want to prescribe them for… reasons), and I have not seen any improvement in my symptoms the way other people describe. Not even a little bit. So, yeah, I am low-key mad (as the youths were saying fairly recently but maybe aren’t saying anymore) that I am apparently the exception to the fucking rule for everything. On the plus side, I have a pretty high pain tolerance threshold and tend to have fewer side effects from medications even in higher doses, so I guess that’s something? Meh.

In other body-related news, I have aaaalmost hit my unofficial “halfway” mark for my weight loss goal. I have been sort of procrastinating on workouts, so I’m going to do one once I finish writing this post. Motivation is really difficult to sustain, mostly because lifting weights is really uncomfortable and I find it kind of unpleasant. Still, if I want to actually become stronger and be able to do things around the house and around the property without injuring myself or just being in pain for days afterward, I need to do the thing.

I had a decent day, all that complaining aside. I got up early enough for a day off, and I spent the day very casually puttering around doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. It’s not perfect, and our new dishwasher is one of those new water and energy saving ones which means it takes two hours and thirty minutes for a single cycle instead of the 40 minutes that my old dishwasher used to take. I do appreciate the water saving aspect, given how small our septic holding tank is, but good Lord am I not a fan of how long it takes. I also got more glass food storage containers for my lunches because there have been a lot of casualties in the past few months and I was starting to run out (two of mine broke at work and the dogs broke one yesterday, much to my annoyance).

2- State of the Smallholding

We’re looking at a record cold few days coming up thanks to a polar vortex, so I packed the quail enclosures with as much straw as I could without smothering them in the hopes that they will be properly insulated. They’ve been doing okay since the last one died weeks ago, and I am really hoping that will be the last of the casualties.

I did plan to start incubating eggs in mid-February, but I am a little worried that they won’t be viable because so many of them are freezing during the winter. I may try collecting eggs multiple times a day on my days off in the hopes of staving off the freezing, but I’m not too optimistic about my chances. If I weren’t worried about starting a fire in the garage, I’d consider putting in a little space heater, even if it’s just for extremely cold temperatures, but yeah. Fire hazard.

3- State of the news

I was busy doing dishes and quail chores all day, so I haven’t actually checked the news and am a little afraid to do so now. I am going to let the news be until tomorrow, I think.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1- State of the Phnee

I am no longer a Phnee. I am an ex-parrot. I am pining for the fjords. Do people still make Monty Python jokes these days? I don’t know, but I am tired and so I am making Monty Python jokes. Something something Spanish Inquisition!

*lies on the floor*

Today was incredibly frustrating. I’ve had about 40 minutes of sleep in the past 36 hours, and I don’t get off work for another 7 hours, after which it will take me an hour to get home, meaning I’ll have been awake for roughly 43 hours and change.

The Quaker Member who called the online attenders “auxiliary” to the Meeting tried to postpone the worship sharing on the State of Society Report today because there was a clothing swap happening at the Meeting house, which had “been on the calendar a really long time!” As if the SoS Report doesn’t have extremely tight deadlines that we need to respect. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in the same room as her, because I might have done something distinctly un-Quakerly to her at this point. I am sleep-deprived and she pushes aaaalllll my buttons.

Then another member of M&C told the people at the end of the worship sharing to send any additional thoughts in writing to her personal email, even though I spent a chunk of time last week setting up a dedicated email account for M&C for precisely this sort of thing. The reason? She said the emails MIGHT GET LOST if they were sent to the DEDICATED M&C EMAIL ACCOUNT. I just… I can’t. WE AGREED. We talked about this and EVERYONE AGREED we should have a dedicated email account. But no no, she’s going to received them and then send them to me. I FUCKING CANNOT.

*rips out hair*

*screams into the void*

I will have to have a chat with her when I am less sleep-deprived and crabby. I understand that she has a ton of institutional knowledge and experience, but that doesn’t mean she can unilaterally make decisions like this. I do NOT like the idea of her funneling emails like this, even though I know she has no ill intent. It feels a little bit power grabby/controlling.

We had a little adventure at work last night when one of my coworkers’ cell phone mysteriously went missing. She’d last checked it when she went to the kitchen, but when she went to grab it from the lockboxes (we have to lock put our phones away before we come into the room where we work) it had gone. We’re usually four people on shift, and all of us took turns searching for it—the washrooms, the kitchen, all the common areas. She checked with the commissionnaires (basically a fancy term for building security but specific to federal government buildings), and no one had turned it in. They checked the cameras and saw nothing out of the ordinary, either. This went on for several hours, with the coworker getting increasingly distressed because it was a new phone that she couldn’t easily afford to replace, and the rest of us powerless to do anything about it. Then, closer to the end of our shift, she found it! She had put it into one of the lockboxes but one that she never normally used because the door is janky, so she hadn’t bothered checking in there because why would she? Night shift brain is wild. We were all very relieved for her.

“Phnee is not allowed to sleep” news, I am really not looking forward to the mandatory all-staff meeting tomorrow (technically later today) at 13:30. For those of you following along at home, that means I will be up for 43.5 hours, then get a maximum of 4 hours of sleep before I have to drag myself out of bed to attend this [censored] [censored] [censored] meeting. I DUN WANNA. *whine moan bitch*

In happier news, I have been working away on my D&D character background. I’m inventing a cult/high control group in which she grew up, and having waaaaay too much fun making it horrifying in that nice-on-the-surface-terrible-underneath way. I don’t know if I’ll have the brainpower to work on it tonight, but I will be giving it a try.

I have a lot of “creative writing” to do this week. There’s Hazel’s background (as I mentioned), plus the Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt, and the State of Society Report, because as I said earlier, we have a pretty strict timeline for that. I am very out of practice with writing, so I will have to hope for a lot of inspiration before next Friday.

2- State of the smallholding

Not much to report on this front. Today was all about the self-inflicted sleep deprivation, so I didn’t get much done other than all of the Quaker things,

3- State of the news

I have not had a minute to myself all day to check the news, so I only hope World War III hasn’t been officially declared while I wasn’t paying attention. These days, you can never be too sure.

Okay, that’s it for me. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1-State of the Phnee

Holy Hannah, I am TIRED, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I woke up on time for the threshing session and managed to stay alert and pay attention for the whole two hours of discussion. It was the usual blend of informative and frustrating, the way all group discussions tend to be for me. I’ve found lately that I don’t have as much patience as I used to for listening to people who don’t listen to instructions or speak only to repeat the same thing four other people have already said or to only talk about themselves when the subject matter is about a much larger issue.

This is not a flex, as the youths say these days, it’s a character flaw that I am working to correct in myself. I need to find more compassion and understanding and make space for people who are interacting with the world in a way that I think is incorrect. I recognize that this is an example of rigidity in my thinking, but I’m having trouble with the praxis part of things these days. I don’t have the emotional reserves to hold that much space for people I don’t know well and who are getting under my skin for their perceived flaws. Work in progress, I guess.

I got the announcements done for tomorrow’s Quaker Meeting, and since no one from M&C has volunteered to be the Greeter, I will have to forgo most of my sleep tomorrow in order to get up in time for the start of Meeting. If I’m lucky I may manage to get a one hour nap before Meeting, and then I will have to be awake for the rest of the day until I get home around 08:00 Monday morning. I will have to invest in some caffeine, I think, to make sure I get through my shift and also don’t kill myself accidentally while driving home. It’s not ideal.

Speaking of work, there is a mandatory all-staff meeting on Monday at 13:30, because of course there is. So that means even less sleep, since that’s the time when I would have been recovering from my night shifts. *sigh* It’s a meeting addressing government cuts and what’s called “Work Force Adjustment,” which is the government’s fancy way of saying “layoffs.” This doesn’t affect me directly, as WFA only applies to indeterminate employees and I am a term employee. They can simply not renew my contract, and it ends there, whereas an indeterminate employee subjected to WFA is subject to different regulations and still has some rights. Still, it will be interesting to see what our execs have to say, since they swore up and down that they would be addressing budget shortfalls without resorting to cutting positions, and I am quite sure that that was horseshit. I am cynically curious as to how they are going to spin this.

In unrelated news, I have been putting off three things of varying levels of importance because they all involve having to make phone calls to people I don’t know. The least important is calling a local(ish) hairdresser to address the absolute disaster that my hair has become in the past year (it’s been at least that long since my last cut, and our well water is very hard and does my poor hair no favours). I also need to make a long overdue dentist appointment and am hoping to find someone local(ish) so I don’t have to drive all the way to Ottawa every time I need to get work done. I haven’t been to the dentist in a long time and am quite sure that my teeth are… not in great shape. I had a referral years ago to a periodontist for receding gums, and since I didn’t have $10,000 at the time to spend on treatment (still don’t), I can only imagine things have gotten worse since then.

Last but not least I need to make an appointment with my doctor. She and several other doctors left the clinic where I was a patient for over 10 years without so much as a by-your-leave, moved even further west from where I live (so that now it will take me at least an hour and a half to drive there), and are now charging an arm and a leg for a bunch of services they used to offer for free at my previous clinic. I was never offered the option of staying with my previous clinic, which is very frustrating, and now I can either pay out the nose and individually for things like forms and faxed prescriptions or pay a yearly “flat fee” for the privilege of accessing medical services. I fucking hate the slow creep of privatization in our healthcare system, it SUCKS. And of course when they moved their booking system was down for nearly six weeks and I can’t even access it without having to call first. I was supposed to get an appointment six weeks after my surgery, but since there was no way to contact them (no phone, no online system), it’s now been three months with no follow-up to make sure that, for instance, my blood pressure medication doesn’t make me violently ill the same way it did to KK. *sigh*

If I had even a little bit more energy (and a lot less anxiety!) I’d consider running for office, because things have absolutely gone to shit in this province and if I’m going to bitch about it I should probably try to do something about it. Of course, I don’t think I’d win. I am a terrible public speaker with the charisma of a boiled potato. However, I feel like the effort needs to be made in some way. Of course, I’d probably have to go and lock down all the fanfiction I wrote all those years ago, which all seems like a lot of work. ;)

2-State of the smallholding

The water heaters I got for the quail somehow got unplugged, so the poor things had no water when I check them this morning—everything was completely frozen over. I plugged everything back in and added some fresh water to tide them over while I waited for everything to melt again. I have no idea how it got unplugged—the only explanation I can think of is that I must have accidentally pulled on the extension cord when I was changing out the food and water at some point.

Sometime tomorrow I also need to make a point of putting out all the paper and cardboard recycling as well. I missed the last collection day, and things have really started to pile up.

There isn’t much else going on right now. I’ve been very passively trying to think of how to get help with “farming” things now that KK appears to have more permanently injured herself. She’s looking into getting herself both a walker and a motorized scooter to help her get around outside the house, and whereas in the past she was able to at least walk over to the garage to turn the light for the quail on and off and sometimes even check their water and food levels, she now either can’t or won’t do it. That means that when I’m working evening shifts or weekend night shifts, or in cases when I’m visiting my parents in Montreal, I will need to find someone else to come look after the quail and eventually the other animals I want to get. The original plan was that I was going to be primarily responsible for all the smallholding stuff, but that KK would be my backup on the rare occasions I wasn’t available or if I was ever ill. Obviously that’s no longer the case, so I need to find a new solution for that problem.

3-State of the news

There hasn’t been anything really new since my last post, just updates on the current (very) long list of global garbage fires. Greenland, Ukraine, Iran, Palestine… it’s a depressingly long list, really.

Our Prime Minister is now in Doha, talking trade with Qatar of all places. After China, I suppose it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him to decide that we can absolutely ignore all those pesky human rights violations and atrocities if it means making the big bucks. *sigh* I was already side eyeing the deal with China a little bit, but Qatar is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations. I remember the horror stories that came out during the last FIFA cup, and I am disappointed but not surprised that our PM continues to prove himself a Conservative wrapped in a Liberal trenchcoat.

Okay, time to get some other stuff done. I have to figure out a reading for tomorrow’s Quaker Meeting, and then if there’s time I have some personal projects I want to work on. I need to write up the background for my new D&D character, and I’m also working with some other people on a Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt which could possibly turn into a TV show (probably not, but the chances are not zero), so I have some writing to do this week.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: cynical

1-State of the Phnee

I am at work, albeit very reluctantly tonight. The sleep deprivation is starting to take its toll, even though I went to bed reasonably “early” (shortly before 9:00am) and got up at 16:00, which means I got almost seven hours of sleep, which is way better than my average this week. Still, my eyes are sore in a way that tells me I can probably expect a headache later if I’m not careful. I do have Tylenol with me, so I will head it off at the pass if I can.

There’s not much to report on today, as I spent most of it sleeping. I didn’t get in a workout the way I’d hoped, so I will have to try that tomorrow at some point (ugh). I do have the treadmill out at work, and I plan on getting in a couple of miles tonight at least.

I will say that I miss the longer breaks we got at the RCMP during our night shifts. I’d gotten into the habit of taking a nap mid-shift, and that was a game changer in terms of being able to get through those rather grueling 12-hour shifts. We only have two 12-hour shifts at TC, but they come right after five 8-hour shifts, so the full effect is brutal. Sometimes I can get away with putting my head down on my desk for a few minutes with my eyes closed, but it isn’t at all the same as having a dedicated space for a full-on comfy nap.

2-State of the smallholding

I did manage to crowbar myself out of my very cozy bed at a halfway reasonable hour and went to the Martintown Market. The good news is that on Fridays they have an even better selection of fruit, and I was able to snag some celery, which I’ve never seen there on Saturdays thus far. I made myself a very tasty improvised “stir-fry” (I use the term loosely) of root vegetables from the market along with some garlic and soy sauce. I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

Otherwise, I didn’t get much done today on the home front. Night shifts are hard, and I’m really not sure why I keep expecting myself to be ultra productive during my night shift weeks. I guess it’s eternal optimism paired with perfectionism. 😉

3-State of the news

A poll has come out showing the results of the question: “If Canada were ever to face a situation in which the United States used military force against Canadian territory, what do you believe should be Canada’s primary response?” The numbers are surprising.

Nationally, 17% percent said they didn’t know/had no opinion, 24% said we should “avoid military confrontation and make concessions to prevent further harm,” and 59% said Canada should “defend itself militarily, even if the odds of success are uncertain.”

More interesting is how those numbers break down along political lines:

Liberal: 16%, 11%, and 73%

Conservative: 16%, 47%, and 38%

NDP: 14%, 8%, and 78%

Block Québécois: 23%, 31%, and 46%

I’m more surprised by how many people didn’t have a response than anything else, but it is VERY telling that the supposed party of law and order and military expansion are the very ones who want us to roll over and show our bellies to the USA. My belief is that it’s because they actually *want* the USA to take us over and make Poilievre into the governor of the “51st State.” Gross. Luckily the majority of Canadians still seem to have some common sense left. I may be a Quaker and a pacifist, but pacifism doesn’t mean letting fascists stomp all over you.

In further Canadian news, Carney has apparently brokered a successful trade deal with China. As far as I can tell the main deal is the removal of tariffs on electric vehicles from China in exchange for a break on tariffs for Canadian agricultural products. Gotta move that Canola oil, I guess! I think it’s overall a good thing that we’re moving away from dependence on the USA, even though China is potentially an iffy partner human rights-wise. But since our choice appears to be fascism down South or communism out East, we have to pick our battles.

Carney has also accepted to join the “Board of Peace” to rebuild Gaza. I am not holding my breath on that front.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1-State of the Phnee

You know, the Almanac swore that we were going to have an especially dry winter, which had me all sorts of worried about drought next summer, but it sure doesn’t *feel* like a dry winter. I think we very slightly exceeded the average for December and we’ve had several inches (I don’t know exactly how many) since last night with no sign of the snow stopping until tomorrow. Now, maybe the “dry winter” means we won’t have much snow from here on out, so I will reserve judgment for the moment, but I have been shoveling way more snow than I was led to believe I would.

Yesterday was a day of even less sleep than Wednesday. It was slow going to get home because of the snowstorm, and I had a bunch of things to do. As I’m pretty sure I mentioned in my previous post, I decided it would be a good idea to run some errands before going home because I needed to get gas anyway. I did that, then wandered around Canadian Tire and picked up some not-quite-essentials: a small plunger, a small drain snake, two more water storage containers (more on that later), and a few impulse buys in the shape of some wrist weights, new scrubby brushes for the dishes (one of ours broke and the other is on its last legs after many years of loyal service), and an apple corer/slicer that was on sale that will hopefully make my life a lot easier next year when I’m processing the apples I harvest from the local trees.

Then, probably in a fit of madness, I decided to stop by Ritchie’s Feed & Seed on the way home. In fairness I am down to my last 5-gallon bucket of quail feed, and because of my work schedule it would mean a deliberate 2-hour round trip to Ottawa just to get a bag sometime in the next two weeks. This way I at least got to save time and gas, even if it meant getting home even later than I’d planned. As I mentioned, we got a bunch of snow dumped on us today, and driving home was a much slower go. I arrived close to 11:00 and did a bunch of shoveling, because otherwise getting into the house was going to be a challenge.

I had originally planned to take a nap for an hour or two before my appointment with the bariatric clinic, but since that appointment was at 11:30, that did not happen. Instead, I finished shoveling, let the dogs out, and logged on a few minutes early. I thought I was supposed to meet with the nurse practitioner, but it turned out to be with the nutritionist instead. Not a big deal, really. I asked about my blood test results and she said she’d spoken with the nurse practitioner and that they are not worried about my values as a certain amount of fluctuation is to be expected in the first 3-6 month post-surgery especially.

I finally got to sleep around 1:00pm, but Rika (KK’s chihuahua) decided that I was not allowed to keep sleeping. She started scratching at my face a couple of hours after until I got up and let the dogs out to pee, so I put her in KK’s bedroom in the hopes that she would settle on the bed and nap. No such luck. She barked and squeaked and shrieked and threw herself bodily at the door at intervals until I finally gave it all up as a bad job and just got up. So, in short, I am quite sleep deprived. I’m hoping to get a decent amount of sleep today since this weekend will involve next to no sleep due to all my [censored] Quaker commitments.

Work has been quite busy tonight. I may have to cut this post short so that I have time to finish and post it before the end of my shift.

I’ve taken a break after finishing the last Expanse novel and listened to Where Are the Children by Mary Higgins Clark, which was a slightly jarring change of pace. It was a fun thriller, but a lot of it felt a little dated, and I couldn’t tell if the rampant misogyny was intentional on the part of the author or just simply a product of an author writing in 1970s America. I’ve only ever read one or two of her books, but they are quick and easy reads, so I may continue with some more if I can find them.

2-State of the smallholding

I feel very lucky to have a generous neighbour who comes and clears our driveway with his tractor whenever it snows. He has saved me so much work already this winter! I don’t want to take it for granted, however, so I will have to whip up a baked good or something as a thank you soon.

Something has gone wrong with one of the quail waterers, because I’ve noticed it gets emptied within hours compared to the other two which take anywhere from 2-3 days to be emptied (for a comparable number of quail using them). It doesn’t have a leak, so maybe the quail are flinging the water around or maybe causing it to leak as they use it somehow.

Today’s plan after I get some sleep is to head to the Martintown Market for more produce and maybe stop by Alexandria for a few other essentials I can’t get at the market. I don’t know if I’ll make it or just opt for more sleep. We’ll see how much willpower I have to drag my sorry carcass out of bed later. The market only opens at 4pm on Fridays, so it’s not like I can go before then anyway.

3-State of the news

I’ve been a bit under a rock today due to all the errands and appointments and aborted attempts at sleep.

Iran’s complete internet blackout is in its second week. European military personnel have started arriving in Greenland in response to the US’s threats, which does not bode well. Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis and has apparently declared that the US “shouldn’t even have an election,” surprising exactly no one who has been paying attention to his regime. Maria Corina Machado gave her fucking Novel Peace Prize to Trump, presumably trying to play nice so he’ll “allow” her to actually run the country that fucking well elected her. It’s so gross. And Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in their continuing efforts to annex the country.

That’s it for now, I think.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

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 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

I got caught at work this morning by a series of bomb threats leveled at six Class A airports across the country. I'm allowed to talk about it a bit because it hit the news pretty early on today. Luckily it was all false alarms, but I ended up staying an hour past the end of my shift. To say things were busy would be putting it mildly: the phone was ringing off the hook with calls from airports, from various internal departments, from our Director General, basically everyone and their cousin. It was a rather intense hour of overtime, I must say.

I had originally planned to stop by the vet to pick up more flea and tick medication for the dogs, and I also needed to pick up a couple of things from a local store, and I didn't want to put any of it off longer than I had to, especially the flea and tick meds. We live in the country now, and KK already found a stray tick in the house (not on any of the pets, luckily, and it didn't look like it had fed before it got terminated with extreme prejudice), so I want to make sure all the beasties are as well protected as I can manage.

So, long story short, by the time I got home it was 10:30, and I only got to sleep by about 11:30. Then I forced myself to get up at 16:00 so KK (with a bit of assistance from yours truly) could finish up the Murphy bed build. And finish we did! We put the doors on the desk/shelving part of the unit, and it is DONE. I didn't get a chance to set up my computer, so that is a problem for tomorrow!me, but I did manage to zip out to the slightly larger town for groceries. We live closer to a smaller town, but there is no grocery store there, which kind of defeats the purpose of going there to get groceries.

As a result, I am running on relatively little sleep, and I just realized that tomorrow morning at 9:00 I have a Ministry & Counsel meeting, so there won't be much sleep then either. At least I'll be able to "sleep in" during the evening if I want, until 8:00 or 9:00 pm even, if it's really necessary. Since I'm working 12 hour shifts all weekend, I will probably do that. Now that the bedroom is "ready" for sleep, I'll be able to cuddle up with the dogs to sleep, too, which is pretty great. The Brittanies are champion cuddlers, and as long as they are with me they are pretty happy to sleep quietly until I'm ready to get up. They may be hooligans, but they are also very sweet. To quote the internet of old: "They're good dogs, Brent."

In political news, it looks like the USA has voted to drastically cut its already pretty terrible medical system (Medicare and Medicaid) in favour of tax cuts, supposedly in the name of reducing fraud or waste, but in reality it's just... I don't know. It's definitely tax cuts for the wealthy, but I think there's a side order of "the cruelty is the point" and probably a lot of eugenics in there as well. The most vulnerable people use Medicare/Medicaid: the elderly, the very young, and the chronically disabled. So I assume the plan is to have a bunch of vulnerable people just... die, I guess. *sigh*

Current Mood: tired

I lined up all my dominoes yesterday to guarantee an early bedtime. I wrote my posts early, fed the dogs and brushed their teeth early, put the quail to bed early, and had myself in bed winding down before 8pm. My plan was foolproof, or so I thought. I was about to turn out the lights and go to bed when my phone rang. I almost didn't answer because the call was from a Montreal number I didn't recognize. I only ever get calls from either my parents or my friend Lu, and all other calls originating from Montreal are usually wrong numbers trying to reach someone with my number but a different area code.

Then I figured, since it was likely a wrong number, I'd answer and just let them know, and then I could go to bed. NOPE. It was a volunteer from American Brittany Rescue calling to schedule my home visit. Oops. So she and I had a very nice chat and scheduled said home visit for ridiculously early this Saturday, and the very nice lady just. kept. talking. for over an hour. I still got to bed earlier than usual, but it was still 9:30pm, an hour and a half after I was ready to turn in. I am deeply frustrated and not a little cranky about the whole business. I'm going to try for an early night again tonight and hope it works better than last night.

*kicks rocks petulantly*

I am unreasonably annoyed by this specific loss of sleep, probably because A) I am bad at adapting to last-minute changes in my plans, and B) I had lined up everything perfectly in order to get to bed at the time I wanted, and if I just hadn't answered my phone, I could have done just that. Of course, if I'd done that I wouldn't have been able to set up the home visit or talk to the volunteer, so there's that, but I am still unreasonably annoyed.

I am tired of constantly being either in a bad mood, or a hair's breadth away from being in a bad mood after even the tiniest setback. Hopefully my attempts at getting more sleep will pay off in that regard. I don't have the luxury of taking time off work (not more than a day here or there, anyway), and psychiatric medication doesn't seem to be terribly effective for me (although I am being nice and compliant about taking my pills). So I'm going to have to trust that focusing on getting more and hopefully better sleep will have a salutary effect. Maybe not living surrounded by precariously teetering boxes and whatever trash KK has left around for me to pick up will help with my (perceived) stress levels as well. We shall see in a few weeks, I guess.

Current Mood: cranky

I don't understand how I can have spent all of today doing next to nothing during my work from home day and yet be absolutely fucking exhausted anyway. (This is a back-dated post, because I collapsed in an exhausted heap into my bed instead of updating) I spent most of the day cleaning out my long-neglected inbox. For the record, my job involves sorting through emails in a separate, shared inbox all day long, so I don't pay attention to my personal inbox most of the time except to quickly read through the new emails in case something important has cropped up. In the past I was more diligent about sorting through my emails and filing them away into various folders, but somewhere around last November I stopped doing that and just let them kind of pile up. I kept meaning to get around to cleaning everything up in there, but I never did, so yesterday I bit the bullet and spent several hours doing that.

There were just shy of 800 emails to sort through, so it took a while, and I am glad that I had a day without having to write SitReps or work on other projects so that I could concentrate on that. I got it down to just 3 emails and today it's down to two because I was able to "action" one of the items (I do hate that it has become a verb, even though in principle I agree that language is fluid and that we should not be prescriptivist about it). One of the emails is something I only want to do sometime next month at the earliest. I am being sent on a course to learn about railway operations, which is super cool, but because part of it will be on-site I am required to wear safety gear (specifically work gloves and steel-toed boots), which I have to purchase myself and then submit my receipts for reimbursement. These days I am hemorrhaging money thanks to the new house and the moving shenanigans, so having to spend another $200 on gear (even if I get reimbursed eventually) is not a prospect I particularly relish. Ugh.

I am probably paying for several late nights over the past few days. I haven't even been going to bed late for a "good" reason, I've just been messing around and putting off going to bed. That has resulted in my dragging myself a little through my days, and the minute I actually get into bed I can't keep my eyes open at all and am always at risk of dropping off to sleep over whatever I'm reading and not getting my CPAP mask on. I shudder to think what sort of condition I'd be in without the CPAP, given that I now know it's making a difference in the quality of my sleep, even if it hasn't resulted in noticeable improvements in energy levels.

All right, that's it for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

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

Unsurprisingly, my mother has come down with the same symptoms as my father. She's taking her meds and being a good patient and resting a lot and drinking a lot of fluids, and so far seems to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I spoke to both my parents yesterday evening, and they're both being pretty good about things. My father is always more motivated when my mother's well-being is very obviously on the line. I wish he were able to project that into being more careful the rest of the time, but that's probably too much to hope for. Neither one of them is particularly good at risk assessment or management, alas.

I've been harbouring a headache and a slightly sore throat since yesterday, and I cannot for the life of me tell if it's Covid or if it's just the stress of the week catching up to me combined with the truly terrible air quality at work or the cumulative effect of using the CPAP without the humidifier (because it was way too warm). Am I paranoid? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face. KK is going to be picking up fresh Covid tests tomorrow if we can find some, since ours are expired and therefore unreliable. It's been increasingly difficult to find Covid tests in Ottawa in the past couple of years--no one seems to carry them anymore. Shopper's Drug Mart apparently sells individual tests for $7.00 each, which is an absolute rip-off, but I expect nothing less from the Galen Weston Jr. empire. The main reason I don't know if it's Covid is because these symptoms do not at all match my parents' symptoms, which are mainly extreme fatigue and some gastrointestinal stuff. So headache and slightly sore throat? Who knows?

Work is going by very slowly, partly because of the aforementioned headache. I'm glad it's not busier, though, because I've already made a pretty regrettable mistake this evening which my shift partner caught, luckily enough, and it's been a pain in the ass to fix. I hate making mistakes at work, even though objectively I know that they are unavoidable. It triggers my impostor syndrome like nobody's business. Oops, make that two mistakes. My coworker is saving my bacon tonight. The second mistake was when I was trying to fix the first mistake, and I didn't realize that there was a new SOP for fixing the mistake and I followed an old SOP for fixing the mistake. *lies on the floor*

I am really looking forward to my bed, which I will be in in about four hours if everything goes really well. I got relatively little sleep today, because we got home from KK's endoscopy shortly before noon, and then I had to wake up in order to be on time for my phone call with Brian, my birth father. He actually sent me a text message saying he'd caught a cold and could we postpone to tomorrow? To which I thought "Sweet, I can go back to sleep!" so I agreed, but I then had to field a call from work asking me to come in early and then changing their minds because the supervisor in question hadn't done the math properly and my coming in early wouldn't actually help anything. After that I had to field a call from my mortgage specialist because the auditor apparently decided that the mountain of paperwork I provided was not, in fact, enough to meet all of my financing conditions for the house. *headdesk* So I have had to send even more paperwork to prove I am not an evil money launderer trying to get a mortgage to launder the rest of my ill-gotten gains through a rural property in Southwestern Ontario.

So, yes. Very much looking forward to my bed now.

Okay. I am going to go heat the last of my lunch and wait for the shift to be over. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: sore

I promise not every post will be about my CPAP adventures from here on out. No, really. But for now you will have to bear with me. :)

The first night with the CPAP was a success, I think. I didn't find the mask difficult to wear at all, despite all the dire warnings I had received ahead of time that lots of people struggle with wearing it and that it's the top reason for noncompliance with CPAP therapy. I think the fact that it's a nose pillow and not a full face mask probably really helped with that, because I barely felt it while I was sleeping. I actually woke up briefly around 2am worried that the machine had turned off because I couldn't feel the air blowing, but it turns out I only feel the air if my head is tilted back, so if it tilts forward at all (which it does during the night as I move around), then I don't feel it at all.

The machine also provides me with a helpful readout/summary of my sleep before I turn it off. It told me I used it for eight hours, and that I had 2.5 events per hour. I'm not entirely sure if that means I only had 2.5 events per hour, or if it only detected 2.5 events, or if I had 2.5 events per hour that the machine felt it need to push extra air or something. Since I was averaging 65 events per hour during my sleep study, whatever this is, I assume it's good no matter what. I did some googling, and the internet agrees that I should be aiming for a readout of under 5 events per hour, and this is definitely under 5, so I'm considering it a win.

My Fitbit readings were also different today. It's actually super bad at detecting my oxygen variation, so I don't pay attention to that, but today it did tell me that I spent a whole extra hour in REM sleep, which jives with the aforementioned reading I've been doing. Studies have shown 50% increases and more in REM sleep the first night of CPAP usage compared to the baseline. It's all pretty cool, really, if you're a nerd who's interested in brainwaves. Interestingly, for the first time in a long time I didn't remember my dreams at all upon waking, and I'm not sure what that means.

Today was a work from home day, and for once I wasn't tapped to do the morning briefing (this is a task for the people who work from home, since we don't have the same operational requirements as the people who are in the office), and I also wasn't given a project to work on, so I kind of twiddled my thumbs for most of the day. I can't complain too hard, because it's a pretty chill way to spend the day, but I'm expected to be at my computer and available to work at a moment's notice, so I can't really go anywhere or get into anything else too much in depth in case I get pulled away. I ended up doing a bit of busywork and watching The Librarians, which I've been re-watching for the past week or so. I actually got to the series finale today, which made me a tiny bit wistful. I had watched the three precursor movies as well, and it's just such a delightful premise and show: the world being saved by ultra-knowledgeable librarians. The series is fun and filled with whimsy, and it's from a time that doesn't seem all that long ago but in fact started over a decade ago (2014) and reflects the optimism of the Obama years, when it felt like knowledgeable geeks might be the ones to show us a better future: math and arts and science and magic, all rolled into one fantastical package.

I made chicken quesadillas for dinner, and it turns out KK has a lot of opinions about quesadillas. Mostly her opinion is that everything in the quesadilla is pointless except for the tortilla and the cheese, and any extra meat, vegetables, or spices are just contaminating the cheese. XD I was making them because I accidentally thawed too much ground chicken and I need to use it up before it goes bad, so she had to put up with some extra contamination of her favourite dairy product, which she did. I was very kind and didn't put in any extra vegetables for her, at least. ;)

Work from home days always feel like I'm in Limbo. I'm often not working on anything in particular, but I don't want to work on my personal stuff on company time, so to speak. I suppose I should try to get past those scruples if I want to get packing done on work from home days, but I think that might actually be a moot point since after this week I only have two day shifts left and the rest will all be evening, nights, and weekends, and none of those are work from home shifts.

All righty. Time for bed. I'm trying to get back into better bedtime habits (I fell off the wagon a couple of weeks ago after several good months of getting to bed between 8:30 and 9:30pm and being asleep between 10:00 and 10:30pm), especially now that I have the CPAP. I want to give it as much opportunity as possible to do its thing of giving my brain oxygen when it needs it.

Current Mood: calm

The day started out quite promising. I was up in time to get out the door for my appointment. KK, however, slept through her alarm and therefore didn't go to the office today, and worked from home instead. Luckily her job doesn't require her to be at the office to perform her duties, and she has come to a tentative truce with her manager about letting her work from home a bit more in order to manage her pain levels better. She had intended to go in today, but the weather change combined with the natural end of the effects of the injections she got in January (it's a special lubricant thing, I think, but I don't know what it's called) have been wreaking havoc on her lately.

The doctor ran 15 minutes late for our appointment, but the appointment itself lasted for maybe five minutes, tops. The doctor confirmed what I already knew, and performed a fairly perfunctory exam of my lungs and throat. Apparently my throat and neck structure are "built for apnea," with an extremely narrow pharyngeal opening, and it seems that still having my tonsils contributes to that, or so I gathered. He wrote me a prescription for a CPAP, and cheerfully told me that about 50% of his patients reported feeling better after CPAP therapy. Not gonna lie, I found that a little disheartening. A 50/50 chance of still feeling like absolute garbage. Boo. I asked if there was perhaps a commonality between the people who did feel better after using a CPAP, and it turns out it works best for people who experience the apnea during REM sleep, which is exactly when I experience it! So I am a little encouraged by that.

Anyway, I called the local CPAP supply place nearest to my house as soon as I left the appointment, and then realized that they were still closed. I called a few more times while I was driving home (using Bluetooth, have no fear), and got no answer. Since it's a literal five minute drive from my home I decided to just go there directly and ask in person, and it worked! I spoke to a nice lady at the counter, and she said they could see me next Tuesday at 1pm. That's not ideal, since I'm working night shifts next week, and an appointment right in the middle of when I would normally be sleeping sounds kind of awful, but I was willing to take it if it was the earliest available one. I pulled out my now tried-and-true "do you have a cancellation list?" card, and she promised she'd let me know, but that their provider was actually only in three days a week since they were "in-between." I had to ask in-between what, since surely there can't be an apnea season, or whatever, and it turns out she meant they're in-between providers, so I guess they just have one person covering multiple locations.

I thanked her, left, got in my car, and hadn't even pulled out of the parking lot when she called me to let me know she could fit me in tomorrow, with an array of time slots, no less! I'm guessing that the provider added a day to the calendar right as I was leaving. So I am getting in tomorrow afternoon at 3pm, which was the latest I could get. I'm working 7 to 3 tomorrow, so I wanted to lose as little work time as possible, given that I had to take nearly two hours off today as well. But the good news is that as of tomorrow afternoon I will likely be coming home with a CPAP to trial for the next three to four weeks! I am VERY excited to get this going. One more (more) sleep!

I was scheduled to work from home the rest of the day, and spent most of that time fighting with Outlook, which has decided it doesn't want to send emails anymore. They just hang out in the inbox and refuse to go anywhere, which is extremely inconvenient. Grr.

Then, right when I was about to get dinner started, all hell broke loose in the house. For some reason, Juno decided to be Very Brave and came downstairs while the Brittanies were loose. The dogs immediately lost their collective shit and took off after her. There was barking and shrieking and growling and hissing, and a million things got knocked around as they proceeded to trash the fuck out of my house. By the time I caught up with them (less than a minute) Pixie had Juno in her mouth and was using her as a chew toy. She let go as I arrived, and she and Peggy took up sentry positions on the stairs, so that they would have easy access to Juno if I tried to carry her up the stairs. Poor Juno was soaked in her own urine, and so all of that got transferred onto me as I picked her up and sent her to the basement for temporary safety. Then a a few minutes later Pixie busted through the baby gate to the basement, and there was another round of me chasing her around. Luckily Juno was well hidden, so at least the only thing to do was chase her back up the stairs.

So then I took a very long, very hot shower. To quote a D&D character of a friend I play with: "Never clean! NEVER CLEAN!" And THEN I made dinner. While I was brushing the dogs' teeth, I noticed that Pixie absolutely reeked of cat pee, so I took her upstairs and gave her a bath, much to her consternation. KK had already mentioned she smelled and had tried to scrub her down with some dog wipes, but they were unequal to the task. Pixie does NOT enjoy the non-consensual wetnesses, specifically she hates being in the rain and also being rinsed, so there was a lot of screaming and carrying on. My poor neighbours must think I routinely torture my dogs, based solely on the sounds that Pixie produces. Jeez.

Anyway, Juno is none the worse for wear after I gave her a more thorough going-over a few minutes ago to check for injuries. Pixie is now clean, and I got absolutely soaked, but I am calling it a win. I have changed the quails' food and water, and they gave me another egg! Luckily I always keep the laundry room door closed, so they were undisturbed by the earlier cat-and-dog antics. I did notice one of the males pecking at the other birds, and I don't like that at all. If he continues to be aggressive he may have to be separated from the others for their well-being. Time will tell, I guess. I will definitely hold off on drastic measures like culling until I get them into larger quarters when we move, since this might just be due to the quail being in slightly too close quarters to each other. But yes, if he keeps it up longer than that he may well end up being dinner one night.

All right. Time for bed. I need to be up at stupid o'clock tomorrow to be at work on time. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: indescribable

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 am very glad that everyone in my various circles decided to opt out of April Fool's jokes today. It just doesn't seem like the right time for that, when everything is so raw.

I am absolutely knackered, so this is going to be a short post. I slept badly (trying to flip from night shifts back to a day schedule is hard), then cleaned the kitchen and took out the recycling before Brittany, the professional organizer got here. We got through about 3/4 of the kitchen cabinets, but the biggest challenge still lies ahead of us. Still, we have three days left together, so I am cautiously optimistic that we can get it all done.

I've put in another offer on a house. The listing is honestly too good to be true, so I assume I will be massively outbid on it, but it would be a lovely house to live in, complete with four acres and a pond. I have no idea why it's on sale for so little, it makes no sense.

Anyway, given the general lack of sleep and the very busy day, I am heading directly to bed and sleep. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: exanimate

I am very ready for this stretch of night shifts to be over. Luckily (I think?) tonight has actually been on the busier side of things, which means the time has gone by pretty quickly so far. I’m not even halfway through my shift yet, alas, but the time is creeping up toward midnight, and at 1am I will officially be at the halfway mark of this last twelve-hour shift. I suppose it’s kind of ungrateful of me to be practically counting the minutes until the end of my shift, since this is what pays my bills, but I am nonetheless still rather resentful that capitalism insists on taking me away from all the fun hobbies I want to engage in instead.

Of course, it’s not like I’m engaging in fun hobbies in the meantime. For the moment I am choosing to blame the sleep apnea. I used to have hobbies and go out and do things. These days, not so much. Now I’ve never been a massive social butterfly, and now with Covid still running rampant I have begun embracing my inner hermit even more than I ever did in the past. Still, not that long ago I had activities that I enjoyed doing, like cycling and swimming and of course all the crafting. These days it takes all my energy to go to work, cook food to keep me and KK from starving, and do a minimal amount of housekeeping.

For now, I am choosing to blame the sleep apnea. I have been trying not to hyper-fixate on it and failing miserably. I suppose I should embrace the hyper-fixation and just go with it. I’ve always had the tendency to go down research rabbit holes about whatever is going wrong with my health at any given time, and long-time readers of my (admittedly boring) blog will recognize this pattern. So, I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about sleep apnea, and the more I read, the more a bunch of my symptoms make sense, including my inability to focus for more than, like, five minutes at a time, my inability to learn anything new except with extreme difficulty, and the constant feelings of exhaustion and lethargy. I also read that sleep apnea can contribute to or mimic symptoms of depression. Now, while I haven’t been depressed per se, I have noticed that I’ve been having trouble mustering the same level of enthusiasm for things I usually enjoy. Hell, even trying to pick a movie or a TV show to watch to keep myself busy on night shifts has been a bit of a struggle because nothing quite appeals to me. I miss just outright enjoying things, you know? There is a reason I have a tag that’s called “Phnee has no chill.” I like enjoying things with unabashed glee, and these days everything just feels kind of muted or dampened. So, my hope is that treating the sleep apnea will get me back to feeling more like my old self. If it doesn’t, I honestly don’t know what my next steps are. More curcumin supplements, I suppose.

I do have another book that I’m hoping to finish tonight after reading the Care Manifesto, called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis. Davis is a towering figure in the world of political activism and philosophy, and while I am familiar with her oeuvre overall, I have never actually read any of her books, so this is my attempt to rectify that oversight. Of course, it will largely be dependent on whether I can muster the concentration and focus needed to read through the book. I am extremely grateful for the existence of audiobooks, but unfortunately a lot of the books I wanted to read this year aren’t available in audiobook form, which is very sad. It’s been phenomenal to be able to enjoy stories again, even in a different format than how I used to read them.

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

Current Mood: optimistic

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

So because the last two night shifts are 12-hour weekend shifts, the halfway mark of my week of night shifts is actually on Friday. Exactly 32 hours of work left before I'm off for two weeks, since I traded my weekend day shifts with a coworker.

I am excited to get through my night shifts and into next week, even though I'm going to be super tired. Between the night shifts and the terrible quality of sleep I've been getting, I'm going to be a bit of a basket case during the week. However, I am excited to have the professional organizer over to help me get the kitchen whipped into shape. I have some ideas about how to move some things around to make things more effective, and I'm hoping she will be able to help me streamline the rest of it to be as functional as possible. I would really like to bring my herb garden into the kitchen, too, although I don't know if that will even be possible. I guess we'll find out.

The international news is currently awash with headlines about the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar. I just saw that the United States Geological Service's (USGS) predictive modelling estimated the death toll could exceed 10,000 people, and that losses could be greater than the value of the country's gross domestic product, which is WILD. How does a country recover from that kind of disaster? I'm actually surprised the USGS is still functional enough to provide services internationally. I assume that Doge will be decimating them shortly. *sigh*

I am struggling a little to find good news in the world these days. Right now everything feels like it's on fire all around me. So even though my own life is going comparatively well, I am struggling with survivor's guilt about that. I'm also worried that the fact that my life isn't going nearly as well as I think it is, and that it could all fall apart at any time. Apart from the fact that I have exactly one year and two days left in my work contract, which means I could very well be unemployed right after that, there's a non-zero chance that my contract could be ended early if the Conservatives get into power and decide to force more cuts in the government. Hell, the Liberals could do the same as well. It's also increasingly likely that we're going to face some sort of violence from the USA, ranging simply from economic violence all the way up to and including invasion/annexation.

It actually reminds me of a post I saw earlier today, by someone named nitewriter:

Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?

The Tiny Me in OSAH-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my head and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.

So, yeah, it all feels sort of like that. I actually tried bullet journaling a while back, and it didn't work as well as I wanted it to, which is kind of weird because the person who invented bullet journaling did it in order to manage his ADHD. I'm actually curious to see if any of the ADHD management techniques that have failed for me over the past few years might not work better after I get a CPAP, supposing the CPAP actually makes a difference in my energy levels and ability to focus and retain information.

I really liked the concept of bullet journals, and I got very excited when I saw all the pretty ways in which people on the internet were customizing theirs, but I got bogged down in perfectionism and preparing my pages in advance started taking up so much time that I would put it off until I was "too far behind" the arbitrary deadlines I'd set for myself. That's mostly because even when I picked the easiest pretty layouts I could find, my artistic grasp exceeded my reach. I am really, really shit at visual arts, and so even very basic stuff takes me forever to accomplish. So if I do decide to go back to a bullet journal (or BuJo, as the kids were calling it a few years ago) I will likely avoid trying to make it look aesthetic and stick to just plain writing. Anyway, I don't plan on trying yet another journaling method at least until I've had my very own functional CPAP for a few months.

I probably shouldn't hang so many hopes on the CPAP. If I turn out to be among those for whom it's not effective, the disappointment will be excruciating. I'm just excited at the prospect of no longer constantly feeling like absolute garbage. I have no idea for how long I've had sleep apnea, but I've felt like the aforementioned garbage for years now, although it got noticeably worse at the beginning of the pandemic, so five years at least now. I assumed at first that the brain fog was just due to aging and ADHD combined, and then it kept getting worse. At multiple times I thought maybe I'd had an asymptomatic case of Covid (in spite of the fact that I mask everywhere in public) which had resulted in long Covid that had fried my brain. Of course, there's no way to test that theory as far as I know. I've been vaccinated multiple times, so the antibodies will already be present in my system. Right now the sleep apnea seems to be the more likely culprit.

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

Current Mood: contemplative

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Page generated Jan. 23rd, 2026 07:31 am

Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with sleep

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Even my productive days feel unproductive

In the home stretch

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Apparently I'm permanently cranky

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flops

Just because you're paranoid...

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