Corner of Bourbon & Division

 I am not going to even try to catch up on the last few months. Well, I might, but it will likely end up in bullet point form. ;) I'm going to try to get back into my good habits of posting every day, or most days of the week, at least. There may be some hiccups on days when I'm extra busy, but I was doing pretty well up until two months ago.

I finished the Move That Would Not End yesterday, after weeks of moving small things and running into minor problem after minor problem. I am swimming in an ocean of unpacked boxes, but my parents came to visit this weekend and helped me unpack about 75% of the kitchen, which is fantastic. So I can now at least make myself a cup of tea in the morning, and I can see my whole kitchen! I have stuff all over the counters which needs to be sorted out, because my new kitchen is WAY smaller than my old one, but at least I've got the basics down.

Yesterday the old house got professionally cleaned, and I took video of the house before I left, and photos of one room because I ran out of space on my phone for video. Bah. This morning I was extra vindicated because I found some old photos of the dog I took when I first moved in in 2014, and those photos show the stain on the floor my landlady claims I made. So now I have *proof* that the "damage" wasn't done by me. I mean, I knew that it wasn't me, but the gaslighting was starting to take a toll after all that time. Anyway, I dropped the keys in the mailbox, and Cruella de Froot Loops, as blackmare  has dubbed her, should forever be out of the picture. Hurray!

I quite like my new house, overall. The one disappointment is that my sofa bed didn't fit in the stairs, and thus can't go in the house. I have decided to donate it to a refugee organization. Hopefully they will be able to make good use of it. I am pretty disappointed, because it was a good sofa, and now I have nowhere for my guests to sleep if I invite them over. I haemorrhaged money these past few months due to the move (moving by yourself is an expensive proposition folks: take it from me, don't be single and mostly by yourself in a strange city), so I can't afford to buy a new bed just yet. My parents have made noises about giving me the two single beds they have in storage, but that would mean moving them from Montreal, and I'm not sure it's worth the cost, honestly. We'll see.

I don't know if I mentioned it, but the adoption-from-foster-care plan is in the toilet, mostly due to my landlady. The CAS wants a stable environment, and apparently moving house makes me unstable. Also, my case worker, after being AWOL for nine months and never answering my emails or phone messages, took exception to the fact that it took me several days to answer one email and decided that I wasn't fast enough for her liking, so they've closed my file. It's not permanently closed, as she told me to reapply in a few years, but I think maybe it's a sign it wasn't meant to be. I've had a bad feeling from her from the start, and I strongly suspect she was just looking for a reason not to accept me as a candidate and just couldn't find a good enough one until now.

I'm going to give myself some time to recover from the financial shock of moving (it was a doozy this year, for several reasons), and then look into other avenues. I think I can still make a great parent, regardless of what CAS thinks. Private adoption is an option, but a very expensive one for a person on a single income. Or there's always artificial insemination, which is also expensive but far less so. The thing with that is by the time I'll be ready to start, I'll be 39, and that's kind of old for a safe pregnancy. It worries me quite a bit.

Since that Big Life Plan™ is on hold for now, I'm looking at smaller plans for the upcoming summer. The move meant I didn't get to start any seedlings, so I'll be buying my plants again this year. I don't know anyone local who has spare seedlings. Hell, I barely know anyone local. I can count the people I know on my fingers and have some left over, and 90% of those are married couples. I should probably feel bad that I have so few friends, but if I had more friends I'd just feel bad that I can't see them most of the time due to work. So that's some consolation. ;)

Anyway, I still have my plot at Vanier Community Garden, and I'm going to hang onto it for as long as I can. I can still get there easily from work, so I can pop by when I'm working, and it's a 20 minute drive otherwise, which is totally doable. I need to be more vigilant about going every day this year, because last year all my edible produce got stolen, and the rest died, which was very sad. Of course, this year I'm not suffering from massive burnout, so I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be better about things.

I'm also going to try to start writing again. This is probably a terrible idea, but there you go. I haven't written much in well over three years, and what little I do write is basically garbage, but I have this fleeting hope that maybe someday I won't write garbage anymore. I'm going to start out small, maybe 100 words or 10-15 minutes a day. I have some ideas for original fiction, since I haven't yet found a fandom that's making me want to write the way my old fandoms did. I miss having a fandom to be super excited about, frankly, and I hope I can find a new one soonish.

Last but not least (for now, anyway), my trip to Paris has served to remind me how much I love travelling. So I have decided to start putting money aside each year for a trip somewhere. I adored by weekend foray into Scotland, so the plan next year is to go back there and do some more thorough exploring. Two days wasn't nearly enough, if you ask me.

Okay, I think that's it for today. Catch you all later!

I don't think I could possibly catch up on everything that's happened since I last posted here, so I won't even try. That being said, there's stuff coming up that I may want to blog about in more depth, so making a bit of an effort now is in order.

First off, hi LJ Land! I haven't been posting, but I do read everything you write. <3

Anyway, have a bullet-point version of the past few months:

• I adopted three new cats in February. It was meant to be two, but then fearsclave was forced to rehome his kitties due to health concerns, and so I got his Maggie as well. Alas, one of the other two cats I got is not integrating into the household, so he will be vacating the premises and going to live with good friends of mine. So far all the cats mostly get along, with some spats and negotiating of territory still happening. Things are settling down slowly but surely.


• I am still volunteering in the soup kitchen at Shepherd's (I won't use the full name, because I don't want their media relations people reading all my posts), and have also started volunteering one day a week at their community garden plot, helping to grow and harvest vegetables for the soup kitchen. I still love it, although the work is often physically very demanding.


• I went on a trip to Barcelona with my parents in March, which was far too short but truly wonderful. I posted lots of pictures on Facebook, so anyone following me there probably saw them.


• The work restructuring continues apace. It is, as I suspected, a PITA, and has resulted in a lot more work being given to much fewer people. Those people are also the ones who are paid the least, not surprisingly. It appears every workplace is the same when it comes to penny pinching: the higher up you are, the less you feel the pinch.


• I also managed to escape to PEI for a while this summer, also with my parents. I've joked with them that we've seen more of each other since I moved to Ottawa than in the past five years I lived in Montreal combined. That's not quite true, but they have been making extra efforts to come out and see me (and vice versa!) since I moved.


• The past two years of commuting to and from work in Ottawa, as well as trying to run two households on one income, paying for private daycare, and then renovating the house in order to sell it, all took a pretty serious financial toll on me. The short, ugly version is that I accumulated a fair bit of debt in order to do that. So I've been tightening my belt (the two trips notwithstanding, although in both cases my parents were generous enough to pay for almost everything) and looking for extra sources of income. I'm currently trying my hand at being a mystery shopper. It doesn't bring in a fortune, and it's not super great work for someone with anxiety, but I'm hoping it will at least offset some of my monthly bills. Every little bit helps, right? I also need to get my act together and try to sell some of the "extra" furniture that doesn't fit in my new, smaller house.


• In happier, not debt-filled news, I have been approved by the Ottawa Children's Aid Society to continue with PRIDE training (Parental Resources for Information, Development, and Education) as well as a home study. The training starts on September 9th, and if all goes well I should be done with everything by the end of October. If I'm approved as a prospective adoptive parents after that, then I get to start the waiting game of being matched up with a child (or maybe children!) in need of a permanent home.

So that's me in a nutshell. I may be using this space to talk about the PRIDE training in September and October, so apologies in advance to everyone who finds that sort of stuff super boring. I promise to put it behind a cut if it gets overly long. :)

I know lots of you have been having a really rough year. I hope you're all keeping as well as possible under the circumstances. *hugs all around*

t! wanted to know what sort of experiences I seek out when I travel to other countries. Remember, folks, if you have a topic you'd like to give me, there are still slots left open at my tell me what to talk about post for this month! The 16th and the 17th are a blank slate, as are the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 26th of June. That's only 6 more topics! Get 'em while they're hot! Or, in this case, maybe a little tepid.

Onward!

( I'm leaving on a jet plane! )

I have been scheduled to go on a week-long training course in Ottawa, during the last week of August. Right in the middle of when I was going to do all my summer canning.

*snarl*

I am annoyed, especially as they've already cancelled this training course four times (each time when it was somewhere interesting like BC, PEI and Newfoundland) when it would have been much more convenient for me to go.

I might be going to Moncton at the end of September for a week-long training course. While exciting, this is also Inconvenient.

Actually, this is more of a request for suggestions, so I'm not actually going to make a real, coded poll. I just want to know what people think.

I'm getting some actual, honest-to-goodness time off in March, to the tune of 10 days total, somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. Patrick's Day (too lazy to go look up exact dates right now).

I haven't had paid vacation in so long, that now that I have it I don't know what to do with it. I want to go somewhere (within financial reason), since I haven't properly traveled in quite some time, either.

Where should I go? Suggestions are welcome and invited, but bear in mind I will not follow them all, and may in fact not follow any of them. :)