Corner of Bourbon & Division

 I have spent all of this shift halfway convinced that it's my third night shift instead of my second. I think it's the fact that I've already been working for nine days straight that makes it feel like it's later in the week than it actually is. I still have five more nights to go, including the 12-hour weekend shifts. I am not really looking forward to any of it, but it is what it is.

I managed to get about six hours of sleep and probably would have slept longer had I not had to get up early for my therapy appointment. I have made the grievous error of agreeing to multiple meetings and appointments this week. I keep trying to not schedule stuff during my evening and night shifts, and I keep failing abysmally. It's just never a good idea, but sometimes there just isn't another choice. Alas.

So later today I have a meeting with tow members of Ministry & Counsel about a small worship group one of them wants to start centered around chronic illness, and on Friday I am going to my new credit union to sign my life away in order to qualify for a reduced interest rate on my new mortgage. Okay, I exaggerate slightly for effect, but essentially I have to switch over to a checking account with the credit union and have my pay direct deposited there in order to qualify.

I've sent out feelers to my coworkers to see if anyone will trade my weekend day shifts in 10 days with me. Getting the weekend off to be able to focus on packing would be a godsend, but I'm not going to hold my breath. People are pretty accommodating at my workplace, but we're getting into summer vacation time and people are a busier with kids and commitments and stuff. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

We're meant to be losing at least some connectivity at work tonight starting in a little over 20 minutes, so I'm doing a very quick update just so as not to lose my "post every day" streak. Yes, these things preoccupy me, don't ask. ;)

I am really hoping it's a minor inconvenience. In theory we have backup systems, but there's a non-zero chance we will have to relocate to another building, which is a huge pain in the ass. We have to pack up laptops and cell phones and binders into backpacks and lug them on foot for several blocks to another building, then have a fight with that building's infrastructure in order to get everything connected, and none of it works quite right nor quite the way we're used to working at our regular workstations. It's inconvenient and annoying, but nothing worse than that.

More annoying is that I have to work this weekend, since I switched with a colleague last month, and so I'm going to spend most of tomorrow and maybe also Sunday mopping up the backlog that this outage is going to cause, which is yet another annoying, inconvenient pain in my ass. 

In the spirit of maybe finally starting to get my act together (hah), I went out today and acquired some more moving boxes. Specifically I got wardrobe boxes, boxes for dishware and glasses, a pack of small book boxes (good for books, CDs, DVDs, and small but heavy items), and a bunch of bubble wrap. I've asked KK to get a start this weekend on clearing the trash out of the living room, in the hopes that that will clear some space to start a staging area for packing on Monday. I don't know if she'll do it, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I likely won't have much time to pack this weekend, but at least I have more materials now, which seems like a step in the right direction.

In the meantime, I am going to have a very short night of sleep tonight. I work until midnight, won't get to bed until probably 1:30 or 2:00, and then I have to be up again at 6:00 in order to get to work on time for 7:45 for my 12-hour shift. *weeps a little*

I had a preliminary conversation with the recruiter about WillScott Mobile (technically the recruiter is from a firm called Duffy Group, I think), and I think it's worth exploring further for now. I think I mentioned that they're located closer to my home than my current work, and it looks like they may have free parking, whereas parking downtown is $24 a day. It might not turn out to be a money saver if I have to drive in every day due to the cost of gas, but I'd have to crunch the numbers to be absolutely certain. I suspect I'd probably end up breaking even, or somewhere close.

Okay, connectivity thing has started. I will try to post this and hope for the best. Fingers crossed, and see you on the flip side, friends!

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!

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!

The sleep study went okay. The ADHD struck and I misread the instructions on when to arrive (I saw "twenty" minutes but the email actually said "thirty," oops) but I managed to get there in time anyway. I located a parking spot ($15 for overnight, ouch) and hustled my way to the secondary reception point, since the primary one isn't open on weekends, apparently. I got myself signed in, then went to the cardio-pulmonary ward where a sign directed me to a waiting room where there were clipboards and pens with a form to fill out.

Am I the only one who overthinks medical forms? Or any form, for that matter? Anything that asks me to answer YES or NO immediately sends me into a tizzy of "Well, it DEPENDS. What exactly do you MEAN?" And of course it's a paper form, so it can't provide answers to your clarifying questions. :P One of the questions was: "Please describe the nature of your sleep trouble," or something to that effect, and I just wanted to yell at the paper "I don't KNOW! That is the whole POINT of having a sleep study done! To see if I have trouble!" I tried to ask myself how a neurotypical person might interpret the question, and decided it landed in the category of "Tell me what brings you in today," and went with that.

I had a very lovely technician named Marilyn who got me all strapped in with more wires than I had initially imagined, which is saying something, because I had imagined quite a number of wires. There were also straps and cannulas and extra sensors. Marilyn was joined by another technician named Rita, and drew on my head using a special kind of wax crayon. It was red crayon, and I amused them a lot by asking about the colour and whether they each had a favourite, because apparently no one had ever asked about the crayon colour before. It seemed a natural enough question to ask, but I guess not. They glued a bunch of electrodes to my scalp using a putty that was kind of like wax and would later prove to be rather tricky to wash out, and then it was time for the sleepings in the beddings, as we say to the dogs in our household.

I actually managed to sleep decently, all things considered. I woke up a few times, but not much more than I would if I were at home, and I had weird dreams in which the hospital setting merged with some sort of superhero storyline (it's all a bit of a blur now). At 04:49 a code blue was announced throughout the entire hospital, which was a little jarring, but I went back to sleep relatively easily after that. I felt bad, but it's not like I was in any kind of position to do anything about the poor person in the ER who was having a truly terrible night. I hope they're okay, but of course I will never know. 

Marilyn woke me around 5:30. I thought it was closer to 06:00, but I didn't look at my watch until I was back at my car and realized it was only 6:05, so it must have been closer to 5:30. I got unstrapped, we commiserated over night shift work, I thanked her for all her hard work, and then got dressed and was on my way. I was home again by 6:45, had a quick snack, then stood in a hot shower for a very long time trying to clean the goop out of my hair, and took a nap from 8:00 to 9:00 so that I wouldn't be a complete zombie at work today (because I had agreed to swap shifts partially with one of my coworkers who had hockey games scheduled today).

I've been at work since 11:00, and up until not that long ago things were pretty busy. Luckily most of it has been pretty routine, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will continue to be routine for the next couple of hours until it's time to go home.

That's it for now. Tomorrow I have an appointment to get my taxes done, and I am considering going very early to get my blood drawn before that, and then much later in the morning I need to take Peggy to the vet to get her bum squished (one of my favourite euphemisms for anal gland expression). Exciting times, indeed! I know you are all riveted by the minutiae of my daily existence.

Catch you all on the flip side, friends!

I haven't even had that busy a day, but I am super tired.

Work is doing a weird thing this week where we're getting half-days to work from home, and it's more annoying than anything else. Finding parking at noon in an already busy building is a hell of an exercise in frustration. They're doing it out of a desire to make things a bit more fair because several people have afternoon courses this week, and rather than simply letting them work from home the whole time and forcing the rest of us to come in the full five days, which is admittedly shitty, they're doing this weird compromise instead. I appreciate the intent, at the very least, because I would have been a little salty about these people getting a full WFH week AGAIN (they had one last month too, and it's starting to feel a little old to constantly be the person who has to come in every single day while they get to be at home all cozy).

We're having another snowstorm that's going to last until at least Thursday, and so traffic was terrible getting home this evening. I think that's part of why I'm tired. Spending an hour and ten minutes in traffic instead of the usual half hour was just life draining.

KK was out for dinner with a friend this evening, so I got the house to myself. I cleaned out the fridge a little and ate some of the leftovers that KK won't touch, and got the dogs organized for bed without too much trouble, and since then I've been slowly settling into bed. As soon as I've finished this post I will be turning in for the night. I am working the early shift tomorrow, which means I have to be up at 5am in order to be at work on time. Blech.

I've been doing pretty well lately about getting to bed on time, but that hasn't actually helped me with feeling any less tired, alas. My sleep test is scheduled in ten days' time, though, and I am practically counting down the hours until it happens. I know I won't get an answer right away, but just getting it done will be a step in the right direction. I really, REALLY want to know if there's a relatively simple fix for how tired I am all the fucking time.

 KK signed us both up for a two-day retirement planning course that's offered for free to public servants in Canada, and today was the first day. The first day is all about the math: how long you have to work to get a "full" pension and how old you have to be, and what a "full" pension actually means. Honestly, it was pretty depressing, and just confirmed my long-held suspicion that I am going to have to work until I drop dead at my desk like that employee at Wells Fargo last year who died and wasn't even missed for a couple of days and spent the weekend dead at her desk before she was discovered by cleaners on the Monday.

I'll be eligible for my "full" pension by today's normal retirement age of 65 (I might even be eligible a year earlier), but the reduction in salary compared to my current earnings, combined with what I assume will be a skyrocketing cost of living means I will likely never be able to afford to live without working. I'm not currently making enough money to pay our bills AND put aside enough money for retirement. I've put away a modest amount of savings, but they likely wouldn't see me through more than a couple of years as a "top-up" to my pension.

Of course, climate change might kills us all in the next decade, rendering this entirely moot. :P

The course was also stultifyingly dull. Your gal is not a fan of maths, and there were so many numbers. So many. The good news is that KK may get to retire and may even get to enjoy her retirement for a bit before the heat death ot the universe.

After the full day of the retirement course I barely had time to pull together a handful of ingredients to get dinner started before it was time for another meeting. A couple of months ago I was approached by someone from my union who asked if I wanted to be part of the Health and Safety Committee, and I accepted. Today was a bit of a blur because I'm pretty new to the public service and I was still trying to wrap my head around all the procedural stuff surrounding committees and motions and resolutions and the like. Still, it was quite interesting, and I'm looking forward to learning more. 

I was patting myself on the back yesterday because I didn't have to go to work until Saturday, so I was going to miss the first day of the huge freaking snowstorm we're having that's going to last all the way to Sunday. So far we've had about 30 centimeters (that's 12 freedom units for my US friends ;) ) and we're expecting at least another 40 cm by Sunday, if not more. KK had a nail appointment this morning and messaged me that the roads were okay but very slippery, and most schools closed for the day as well as the public library. People with the option to work from home were told to stay there. We also lost power for about an hour and change at 11am, so it was an interesting morning.

Anyway, I settled in for a nice snow day at home, and shortly after we lost power I got a call from my office asking me to come in for overtime this evening. *sigh* Now, I can always say no to OT, but ya girl is trying to buy a house over here, and every little bit of extra money helps, you know? The Overtime Fairy is not ignored lightly! So I resigned myself to having to put on my grown-up costume (i.e. work clothes) and put my plans for the day on hold in order to get ready for work.

KK called me when she got home about an hour later to let me know that the plough was outside, and she was just waiting for it to clear her parking spot. I had told her about the OT already, so I informed her that I'd put on my boots and run out as soon as she was in the house in order to clear the snow from my car and get it out of the driveway so the plough guy could do his thing. One of the few perks of living where I do is that snow removal service is included with the rent, which I must say is very nice, and I will miss the service if I ever move away.

In spite of what I'd just said, I decided to pull on my boots and coat and go out right away. Normally I'd have waited because it's far easier if one of us is inside to wrangle the dogs, but I didn't want to miss the window during which I could get my driveway ploughed. It turned out to be an excellent idea, because KK had rather unwisely tried to drive through a large pile of snow left by the plough and had gotten her car very thoroughly stuck in there. "I beached myself," as she eloquently put it much later. The plough driver actually got out of his vehicle and was helping shovel/push her car out of the snow bank, as were two adorable Ukrainian boys, one who seemed between 12 and 14, and the other who was no more than 10 years old at most.

The 10-year-old was the chattiest, bossiest little boy I've seen in a while, and was unintentionally hilarious in the way that small boys can be. He very seriously informed KK that Russia and Ukraine were different countries (I didn't need this explanation, apparently, probably because I told him my mother was Romanian), yelled at the plough driver for not clearing the snow drift ("The lady wouldn't be stuck if you cleared all this snow!"), and spent a lot of time whacking the snow drifts with his car brush rather than doing anything useful. Ah, youthful exuberance. He was momentarily stymied by the scraper end of his car brush, which I then showed him how to use and explained what each side was for. He then frolicked in the snow for a bit before returning to his brother to help clear more snow from the front of my car. They did a pretty creditable job, I must say, and I rewarded them with the last $10 I had in my purse. I usually like to give a $20, but I was unprepared today, unfortunately, and could not adequately reward their entrepreneurship.

I very nearly got stuck in the driveway anyway, but a bit of quick shoveling in front of the tires fixed my issue, and then the snow plough and I did an intricate dance around each other. I kept trying to move out of his way, but no matter which way I went, a moment later he'd go the same direction. It was funny but also kind of maddening. He also nearly ran over my shovel, which I had left only a little to the side as I didn't expect him to go straight to my driveway, and then he DID run over my garbage can and dragged the lid halfway to Kingdom Come. Luckily it wasn't damaged when I retrieved it, but I wasn't best pleased. However, he did clear the entire driveway, which made leaving for work a couple of hours later so much easier. In fact, when the time came, I barely had anything to clear off my car, and since the driveway was clear as well I was able to sail away super smoothly.

So I've now been at the office for three hours, and got the rather disappointing news that my offer on the latest house was also rejected. However, there were THIRTEEN other offers, so I rather think I never stood a chance, all things considered. Oh well. Further up and further in, I guess!

For now it's time to heat my dinner in the microwave and get through the rest of the shift. I need to enter my extra hours into the system so I get paid, which will be very nice when it does happen. I do enjoy having overtime pay, it helps pad out the end of the month like nobody's business.

It really does feel like my days just zoom by, and I have nothing to show for them except working and sleeping. I haven't even been cooking much during the past couple of weeks because of my evening and night shifts. Yes, I ran a metric fuckton of errands last week, and to a lesser extent this week, and somehow I still feel like I accomplished nothing.

It's possible I'm being too hard on myself, but other people are out there doing the same job as me but also raising children and running Girl Guide groups and playing sports in the evenings and going on dates and tripes with their spouses. Several of the younger women here play hockey or socker or whatever else, and a couple of days ago they were talking about a game they played that started at 10pm. Just, no. If I'm not working a shift, at 10pm I am asleep. I don't leave the house after 7pm most of the time, let alone go play a freaking sport at 10pm. *shakes head incredulously* Now, to be fair, these young women are literally half my age--not a one of them is a day over 25, and maybe at their age I had a bit more get-up-and-go than I do now, but my get-up-and-go got-up-and-went a long time ago. I am tired just thinking about this, quite frankly.

Since KK was working from home today, I left my bedroom door open a little in case Octavia (my youngest kitty, who will be turning eleven this May *sob*) wanted to come have a cuddle. She doesn't get much unadulterated cuddle time anymore, because the dogs' crates are in my bedroom, and I have to keep the door closed for a number of reasons. The primary reason is that KK's dog Rika likes to come in my room and poop under my bed. The second reason is that if my dogs spot any cats coming into the room, they scream the place down, and no one gets any sleep. So the poor cats are exiled unless I'm working night shifts and KK is working from home and can keep the dogs downstairs. Normally either Juno or Octavia will come keep me company, but today there was no sign of Juno, and Octavia decided to come into my room and stand by the door and scream at me instead of cuddling. It was actually quite funny, but also I was a little sad because I would have loved some uninterrupted cuddle time with her. Ah, cats. What can you do?

Tomorrow is the monthly meeting of Ministry & Counsel, and we are discussing the State of Society Report. Our clerk sent us a draft that they had put together, and at the risk of sounding extremely mean, it was both incredibly lackluster and somehow also managed to make me rage at the same time. The latter was because the clerk wrote "the threat of Covid 19 has waned," and NO, I CANNOT STRESS HOW MUCH IT HAS NOT WANED. Fuck everything. This is a person whom I know is Covid-cautious, does not attend Meeting in person, is careful about masking, etc. WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THAT? I feel like I'm being gaslit. Anyway, I sent back much politer comments to that effect, and hopefully we will be able to get that sentence either stricken or altered, because JFC I will not stand for Covid minimizing in my community. I will NOT.

*breathes deeply*

ANYWAY. The rest of the report felt super flat, as if the clerk couldn't muster any enthusiasm for any of it. They wrote a better report last year, so I know it's not just their writing style, or whatever. I don't know if they are struggling or maybe a little depressed or what, but it felt like kind of a depressing read. I'm hoping that if we all provide some extra input tomorrow we'll be able to make it a little nicer. One of the members has yet again accidentally double-booked herself tomorrow, and I am trying to scrape some compassion from the bottom of the empty barrel of my soul. She has ADHD as well, and I get it--the struggle is real. But I for the most part (with one single exception) have managed to be present and on time for every meeting, and she is routinely late or doesn't show up at all, and she's usually late because she's decided to do something right before the meeting (like go to a busy restaurant with her husband), or lost track of the time, or didn't realize she'd booked a conflicting appointment. And another member keeps vanishing on extended trips with his wife or cancelling because he doesn't plan his freelance work gigs properly. Like, folks, COME ON. I am the youngest in our committee by about fifteen years and I am the only one with a full-time job that requires my presence in an office, and yet I manage to put things in my calendar and be on time. I'm not the clerk, so it's not my job to herd the cats, but it's incredibly frustrating to constantly have people missing the one hour a month we all committed to.

/end rant

I am apparently in a MOOD today. :P Sorry for the slight bummer of a post. I will end on a good note, and say that I renewed my community garden plot today, and received the good news that I am being moved away from Mosquitoville and to a better, more accessible plot! I am no longer relegated to the back corner where there was no sun and ALLLLLL the mosquitoes and the ground was full of roots. This is good news on so many fronts, I can't even begin to tell you. Trying to garden in that back plot felt like a punishment. Hopefully this year I won't have to have as many fights with my plot in order to get anything to grow in it. I will need to transplant all the perennials I put in my plot last year, but that's not that big of a deal, I don't think. I may ask for some friends to help me with that, particularly transplanting the asparagus that I carefully planted last year, so that I don't have to do it all on my own and risk damaging the plants.

If I have time tonight I will pull out my seed list (although it's missing a couple of things that I need to add from my seed box) and start planning what I want to put in my garden this year.

I'm mostly back on a Monday to Friday schedule, even though I am working shifts again. I work two weekends every two months, and am rewarded with nearly two weeks off every two months as well. The rest of the time, though, I work Monday to Friday, albeit different hours than most people. For three weeks I work from either 8 to 4 or 7 to 3, and then I work a week of evening shifts, and then a week of night shifts plus the weekend, followed by five days off and then one weekend of day shifts.

So Fridays have resumed being the last day of the work week for me, for the most part, and Mondays are the first day of the week, which means that I'm being slowly reintroduced to looking forward to specific days of the week (e.g. Friday). It's a kind of novel feeling, even after two-odd years of working a regular schedule, because I spent so many years just dreading the first day of whatever "block" I was working and not associating that with any specific day of the week.

To be fair, there's very little dread these days. I'm still very much in the honeymoon period of this new job. My coworkers are all varying degrees of nice so far, and while there's the usual array of personalities with some who are more inclined to work hard than others, no one is actively an asshole. More importantly the manager appears to be a genuinely good guy, and if there's anything I have learned in 17+ years of working in the government, it's the manager that makes or breaks a department. So I'm cautiously optimistic that, as long as the current guy stays here (and he's fairly young and doesn't look like he's dying to climb further up the ranks right now), I should be okay. I'm currently looking at a minimum of 19 years before I can retire, so I'd really rather not spend all that time working for people who make me miserable. Should I be able to rise above poor management? Probably. But it's not a skill I've mastered, and I doubt I will ever fully master it before I'm either of retirement age or dead, whichever comes first.

KK is currently dealing with her manager, who is just kinda casually ableist and is therefore making her life extra hard. KK has had to either work from home or take sick days the past little while because her arthritis has been making it incredibly painful for her to go into the office three days a week, and her manager is taking umbrage. She (the manager) has moved into "performance management" mode on this, and is now officially documenting how KK is not being compliant with the Treasury Board directive on working three days in office. She has written down that the reason for KK's failure to attend is the dog and my work schedule, which is absolutely not true. The epileptic chihuahua and my shift schedule make things more complicated, for sure, but KK has been working around both those things, and what causes her actual absences is her chronic pain, which is made exponentially worse by having to go into the office as often as she does.

I am livid on her behalf, of course, but luckily KK is well versed in her rights and obligations as a federal employee, and is now taking action accordingly (the "performance management" conversations officially began yesterday). She's in an unrepresented position, meaning she doesn't get to have a union representative, but she still has all the same rights, so she's planning on talking to the Ombudsperson for Workplace Health and Safety today. If it comes down to it she can file a complaint based on a Human Rights Violation, but hopefully it won't come to that. She works in a tiny office (10 people or so), and it's never great to have a totally adversarial relationship with one's manager.

The manager says that she's been getting complaints from other employees about KK not coming in, for which I have no sympathy at all. As a manager, it's up to you to manage your employees, and that includes managing their expectations and telling them to mind their p's and q's when it comes to other people's business. If KK was having actual performance issues that had a direct impact on their work, that's one thing, but whether she does her work from home or the office has no bearing on the quality of said work. Apparently the manager's boss has also remarked on it, but again, as the manager it's up to her to explain that KK has a medical condition that needs accommodation. Of course, that's not what the manager has been doing and has instead thrown KK fully under the proverbial bus, which is infuriating, but hopefully they will get that straightened out soon.

On top of it all, the manager is faking concern that KK "doesn't do well" psychologically when she's at home all the time. In her capacity as a mental health professional, I guess. *eyeroll* She has absolutely zero basis for this opinion, of course. She herself is of the opinion that "no one does well on their own," which is, you know, her opinion, man. She has no qualifications to make mental health assessments, and so I am just adding that to the category of casual ableism.

That manager is lucky I'm not in their office, because I'd be obligated to go throttle her for the benefit of humanity.

In other news, we're going to see at least one more house tomorrow, possibly two. I say possibly because my real estate agent says the second already has two offers on it and may be conditionally sold by the time we get to it. It's not surprising, because it's a "turn-key" house on 1 acre of property at a very competitive price for the market. The price honestly made me wonder what was wrong with it. ;) I think it's probably because it's actually a really, really small house. Like, not quite Tiny House proportions, but really on the small side.

The other house has a lot less property but looks to be bigger, and also seems pretty turn-key by the looks of things. That being said, it's about $40k more. Still within my price range, but much more in line with real estate prices in the area these days.

It would be nice to see both houses and see if either or both would be a good fit. This isn't truly an ideal time to be buying a house for me, since I'm a little on the strapped-for-immediate-cash side of things, but if we find a house that we absolutely fall in love with I can probably swing it. I just have to get my shit together and hope that the deposit required isn't horrendously high. I'm honestly still a little insulted that there's a deposit required in Ontario, when that wasn't at all a requirement when I was purchasing a house in Québec. What's so different between my home province and this one, I'd like to ask?

In the meantime, a third house has cropped up! So I have asked if we can see that too. Our poor real estate agent will be run off her feet tomorrow. Usually we see one house and that's it, but tomorrow it might be as many as three. Yikes. It's January. I have no idea why there are suddenly a bunch of houses on the market within our price range that actually look like they could be a decent fit, but I am not complaining. Well, I am complaining a tiny bit, but mostly because I really wanted another couple of months to save up more money for a deposit. But mostly I'm not complaining. Mostly.