Corner of Bourbon & Division

I can't think of anything to write about tonight, which is kind of a problem since I'm trying to maintain an updating streak. The days are sort of blurring together this week, which often happens when I start evening and night shifts.

Ministry & Counsel are driving me a little nuts this week. There has been a flurry of emails about the State of Society Report, which honestly should be finished by now but people from the Meeting keep goddamn nitpicking at it and I am ready to scream. There's also a lot of dithering about whether to extend the contract of the Resident Friend, who has come to the end of his three year contract. Everyone seems to be in favour of extending it, but typically contracts don't extend beyond three years, and the previous Resident Friend actually hired a lawyer to force the Meeting to extend her contract for a number of reasons I won't get into here so as to protect her privacy. It was super messy, and everyone is understandably a bit skittish about having a repeat performance, even though there is absolutely no indication that the current Resident Friend would do the same. It's not even up to Ministry & Counsel whether to extend the contract, we just make a recommendation one way or the other. Bah.

I have decided this year to pay someone to deal with the ocean of poop in my backyard after the winter season. I want to put in a couple of raised beds, but this will work better if the yard isn't covered in dog poop. Two Brittanies produce more poop than you'd imagine over a single winter season. Anyway, hopefully this will be the start of making the backyard look less like a muddy cesspool for the dogs to wallow in. I actually paid someone for the past two years to do a spring clean-up, and that company stopped offering the service in my area (it may be temporary but they can't give me a timeline of when they think they'll have someone in my area again), so I found another service with comparable prices. I'm actually pretty impressed that there are two companies that offer poop removal services in my city. Who knew?

I've ordered groceries for tomorrow, and I must say that ordering groceries has been a blessing. I was always reluctant to take advantage of delivery because it felt like cheating, somehow, but honestly not having to spend two hours a week on grocery shopping has changed my life. Two hours doesn't seem like all that much, but my God it drained all my energy like no one's business, and it would just wreck half a day (prepare the list, drive to the store, shop, drive home, unpack the groceries, collapse from lack of spoons). So, yeah, now I either do pick-ups during weeks when I'm working regular day shifts, or delivery when I'm working evenings, nights, and weekends. I'm trying to view it as an accommodation and not feel too guilty about it. I also make a point of tipping as well as I can (the website has a limit on how much you can tip the delivery person, alas).

Tomorrow I have therapy in the morning, and then my last evening shift starting at 3pm. KK had an appointment with the registered dietician from the bariatric clinic today, and it looks like I'm going to have to work a little harder to get more protein and nutrition into our everyday food. I've been looking at one of the bariatric cookbooks I got when she first told me she was going to get the surgery, and much as I feared, a lot of that food is quite simply stuff she won't eat. So much of it is tomato-based, or involves tofu or mushrooms or beans or coconut. Most of the recipes sound delicious to me, but I will have to make some serious modifications or maybe just take inspiration from them rather than following them exactly. I've had some success in the past from substituting some ingredients in recipes, so hopefully we'll be able to find something that works.

I'm planning to incorporate increasingly bariatric-friendly recipes in our meals, so that KK will have a chance to get used to them and it won't be a huge change all at once, once she's past the point of the liquid food/puréed food part of the post-surgical diet. It will be good for me to get used to it as well, but I'm much more of an omnivore than she is. When I was talking to the dietitian on Tuesday I kind of had to rack my brain when she asked me if there were foods I didn't like at all. There are definitely some: I don't really care for olives, sardines, and liver, among other things. I don't think there's anything I absolutely won't eat. I'm not a huge fan of slimy textures, either, like undercooked eggs (undercooked whites are the wooooorst), but overall I can choke down almost anything out of politeness if I have to, it's just a matter of foods I won't seek out. Feeding KK stuff she will actually eat is going to be a hell of a challenge once I can't smother everything in cheese anymore. ;)

Interestingly, I found out today that KK is not as far along in the process as I thought. I'm supposed to talk to the behaviourist and then do the Pre-Surgery 2 course, and she told me today that she hasn't been to Pre-Surgery 2 either, whereas I thought she had already finished that stage. It's true that she's a lot more complex a case than me both from the standpoint of her physical health and her mental health, and so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she's had to have several extra appointments with the dietitian, psychiatrist, and behaviourist, on top of having to undergo that course of antibiotics to get rid of the h. pylori infection she was rocking last year. She started the process in early-ish 2024, so at the rate we're going I may get ahead of her on "the path" as they like to call it.

The only thing I want to avoid is having both of us in surgical recovery at the same time. It will be bad enough when I go through the surgery, because she won't be able to help me at all (and I am rather concerned about the weight restrictions for lifting/pulling/pushing because she won't be able to help with groceries or anything else), so having her be incapacitated after surgery with me unable to help her in any way is a recipe for disaster. I have to make sure I'm as functional as possible for the most amount of time possible. It's possible that once she starts losing a substantial amount of weight she might be able to do more around the house, but I'm not banking on it. I don't think it's a realistic expectation at this point.

Anyway, I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

This weekend I'll be home for the most part, so hopefully I'll have the chance to get stuff done. Seed starting, cleaning, and a bunch of cooking and meal prep for next week.

I've been at work for an hour but today has lasted eighteen million years or so.

I got to bed shortly before 2:00, but since I had a 9:00 appointment at the bariatric clinic and I knew that sometimes traffic and parking can be dicey, I got up at 7:00 in order to leave at 7:45, with a view to arriving around 8:30. Oh boy, did THAT not turn out the way I planned. It was snowing, you see. "Snow, Phnee?" you may ask. "Surely in Canada you are all accustomed to snowfall and can adjust accordingly?" To which I'd answer: "You'd be surprised, and don't call me Shirley!"

For some reason, there were no snow ploughs to be seen anywhere, including the highways. I counted no fewer than five vehicular collisions on my way to my appointment, and traffic had slowed to a crawl even on the side streets near my house. The trip that usually takes me 30 minutes when traffic is clear took an hour and a half, and therefore I arrived in the parking lot already 10 minutes late for my appointment. Then the parking machine stubbornly refused any form of payment card that I offered, and since it also didn't accept cash, I gave it up as a bad job and went in hoping that I wouldn't get towed or ticketed (which, luckily, I didn't). Then the receptionist ignored me in favour of finishing up the world's longest phone call, in which the patient on the other end was asking questions that were very obviously not urgent, and since by then I was 20 minutes late (I had called ahead twice to advise them of the situation) I was pretty stressed out, and it took all my self-control to remain polite and not come off as aggressive/impolite/entitled/whatever in any way, because that's a good way to get yourself thrown out of a medical practice these days. But I knew the nurse practitioner was waiting, and she couldn't know that the reason I was extra late was just because the receptionist wouldn't put a phone call on hold for one minute.

The appointment itself went well. I will put a few more details behind a cut, so that anyone who doesn't want to read about weight, deliberate weight loss and medical interventions for said weight loss can skip that part. I will not be discussing specific numbers.

( Discussion of weight, weight-loss, and medical weight-loss procedures behind the cut! )

Okay, onto other stuff that happened with my day that's not weight-related!

First off, I finally got my compost worms! I sent a follow-up email yesterday, got a reply from the owner of the operation referring me to an employee, and the employee answered my email at, like midnight, which is wild to me. Go to bed, people, I don't expect service 24/7 for worms, IT'S FINE. Anyway, I called her after my appointment and arranged to drive out to what kind of felt like the middle of nowhere to pick up said worms. I took them home tucked inside my coat, because she said they'd gotten cold and it would be best to get them settled quickly. Since I had a 40 minute drive in bad weather ahead, I figured human body heat would be just the ticket, and I wasn't wrong. They were in a glass jar, in case you somehow imagined that I just had pocketfuls of worms or something. :P 

I got home without incident, caught KK up on all the happenings, got the worms situated in their new home, and promptly crashed out for a one-hour cat nap that was interrupted on multiple occasions by my beloved hounds baying loudly at the neighbours, the squirrels, the Amazon delivery person, and the lovely people who came to shovel our walkway. The dogs have Strict Opinions about anyone or anything coming too close to their house, you see, and those opinions are invariably loud and shrill. I love my dogs, they are a delight.

After that I had just enough time to shove my lunch into my bag and head to work. I left early just in case the road conditions were still terrible, but I was pleasantly surprised and arrived early. My coworker took advantage of my arrival to also leave early, meaning I'm working voluntary OT today for about 20 minutes, but whatever. What was more annoying was that he somehow managed to unplug the headset adapter while he was working. I'm one of the few people here who uses a headset, because between the back injury and the hearing loss, I find I can work much better with it. However, people keep accidentally or deliberately unplugging the adapters in new and creative ways, and, like today, I don't always notice right away. So of course my first call was for a possible IED (they're always false alarms but I have to treat each one as if it was real), and the headset wasn't working and my coworker had shut down the computer instead of restarting it, so I was on the back foot for at least 10 minutes until I got all the technical issues sorted out, which made me very grumpy indeed.

Since then things have calmed down, enough for me to type out this post, so I can't complain too hard. I remembered to bring my knitting tonight, and I'm hoping that I might actually be able to finish the Hubris Shawl, if not tonight then maybe tomorrow. Maybe. We shall see.

I think that's enough for now. See you on the flip side!

I've decided I'm going to discuss weight.

TRIGGERY ISSUES AHOY! It's all going behind a cut. Do NOT read if you're triggered by talk about food, diet, weight loss/gain issues, eating disorders, body image issues, or anything remotely linked to that.

( Thoughts on Weight )