Corner of Bourbon & Division

Not necessarily in that order. Come to think of it, when all the craziness has died down I may well do a Sergio Leone rewatch. It's been a while since I enjoyed a good Spaghetti Western. :)


( Nattering about the week that just went by and the week to come )

It started raining before I could get out in the yard this evening. Alas. On the plus side, pdaughter has agreed to give me a lift to and from the auto repair shop tomorrow, which means I'll be able to come back here and do the yard work during the morning.

It's been a long day, but my overtime went really well. I've been training for two non-consecutive days at the OCC in Ottawa so that I can help them out when they're short-staffed, and while the first shift was a bit mind-blowing in terms of all the information I had to absorb in such a short period of time, today went much better. It was a much busier day than the last time, but I was able to handle almost all of the work without too much assistance, which was reassuring for everyone. After all, I'm supposed to be there to help them, not be an additional strain on their resources.

The best call of the day was from an officer who wanted me to call in the city police to help relocate a family of ducks who were blocking an entire intersection. After we all laughed at him, he was (nicely) told to deal with the ducks himself. We do realise that it's good PR to have "Officer Saves Ducks!" on the 6 o'clock news, but come on, you're holding up traffic at rush hour. Your YouTube video is not going to go viral, okay? Okay.

I have a mild but very persistent headache, so I think that's all I'm going to write for this entry. Next on my list is (more) Advil and getting into comfier clothes. I have a busy day and a half ahead of me, after all.

See you on the flip side!

*points to icon*

Not dead, just busy.

There is lots of Big Life Stuff happening that I'm not able to discuss. Plus, I'm really really busy.

What I can discuss is that I've been asked at work to fill in for another section, so I've been working some overtime lately and am likely to be working more overtime in the future. This is good news from a financial perspective, at the very least.

If you don't hear as much from me in the next little while, that's why.

If I have time sometime next week, I will try to post pictures of all the yard work I've been doing. I'm nowhere near done, though, so it might have to wait, unless you're really keen on seeing pictures of dirt. :P

Hope everyone is doing well, or at least as well as they can be!

I decided to start researching paving slabs to see if I could find some that are a decent price (I had a flash of inspiration that told me that I could go to Home Depot or the like tomorrow before leaving for Montreal, thus sparing me an extra trip this weekend). The problem I think I might be encountering is not so much that I can't afford the slabs, but that the job of laying them out might be a case of my biting off more than I can chew.

Let me provide some context. The area I want to lay over with paving slabs is right at the base of the stairs leading down from the back balcony. It's about 60 square feet worth of space, 2 feet by 30 feet. Between the hard winter and the dog using it as his bathroom all winter, it's now all hard-packed dirt that turns into an oozing, churning morass of mud whenever it rains. Also, in spite of my attempts to clean out all the dog poop, well, some of it inevitably got ground in there as well.

The idea was therefore to create a clean space there using paving slabs. I thought I could simply lay them down, and, even if they weren't perfectly lined up, it would still be better than wading through mud and residual faecal matter. The more I research, though, the bigger this project seems to be. It doesn't look like I can simply put down the slabs and hope for the best. All the websites I've looked at insist that I have to excavate the area where I want to put them, then fill it in first with gravel (or loose stones, or what have you), pack that down using a tamper, and then fill in another layer with sand, tamp that down. After that I'd have to put in edging, held in place with nails, and only then would I be able to put down my paving slabs.

So not only is this project turning out to be a lot more expensive than simply getting some paving slabs to put down (gravel and sand and edging and nails, not to mention renting a tamper), but it's not something I can do in less than a day at best. And that's supposing I even know what I'm doing, which I absolutely do not.

Out of curiosity, is there anyone out there on my flist who has done something like this before? Any advice? Dire warnings for ignorant amateurs like me to not do this sort of thing unsupervised, ever?

Halp.

At this point, even if I do get the materials this weekend, I may have to resign myself to not getting the paving slabs put down. If I get the yard clean, though, Bean might at least be able to play if he simply avoids that one area (hah). Of course, there's still the issue of there being no fence, but at this juncture I can't actually help that until people come by to give us an estimate. I'll see if I can get one from some other service providers, too. I have a Home Depot card, which is why I'm trying to stick with them as much as I can, since it gives me some breathing room rather than having to cough up all that money at once.

Right. Back to work.

Had a great night with sultrysong yesterday, even though we both ended up going to bed much later than intended. By the time I turned out my lights it was nearly 1:00, and I didn't manage to sleep past 9:00 this morning. So, yeah, eight hours of sleep, but that's going to translate to 4 hours of sleep per day when spread out over the course of last night and tonight. *sigh*

Still, it was worth every minute. We ordered pizza, had a beer (only one, in spite of what my icon might imply!), and since she's on a business trip we got to claim it as an expense. The only thing better than beer is free beer, am I right? We spent the entire time chatting and catching up on our lives, and had a grand time.

I am not looking forward to the next few days, though. I have an appointment to get my tires changed on Friday, which means I'll only get about three hours of sleep then, and then I have to drive back to Ottawa on Saturday evening for an overtime shift on Sunday. Don't get me wrong, the extra money will be great, but there's going to be very little sleep for me in the foreseeable future.

I haven't heard back from Home Depot yet about getting an estimate for the new fence, so if there's nothing by tomorrow I'm going to call them and hassle them a bit. I really want to get that fence up ASAP. I'm hoping to get the yard completely cleared this weekend. I don't know how long the tire change will take on Friday (I'm guessing about an hour and a half to two hours), which will put me at home around 17:00. If I play my cards right I'll still have some daylight hours after dinner, and there should also be some time on Saturday for that sort of work. Of course, we're having a garage sale on Saturday if the weather permits, so I'm going to have to juggle that at the same time. At least this year Bean is unlikely to need to be brought to the ER during the garage sale. :P

I'm quite sure I had more to say than this, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. So I guess I'll leave this entry as it is. I can always come back and update again later, right?

Last night my brain decided that I should stay up and Worry About All The Things™. So I was up until at least after 2:30, which was the last time I remember looking at the clock before falling asleep. The good side to that was that I was awake at midnight when Bean woke up screaming bloody murder because he had to go to the bathroom. He's been getting up almost every night now to pee, and that has resulted in dry diapers in the morning. So we're well on our way to having him be completely diaper-free at this rate. It's very exciting!

Bean was also up promptly at 6:20, and since he came into our room to ask his mother if he could watch television, that was loud enough to wake me as well (mostly because he started whining and then screaming when she said no), although I had set my alarm for 6:30. So I got up then too, much to Bean's befuddlement. He's not used to my getting up at the same time as him and Mama.

We got Bean fed, dressed and out the door on time (three tantrums, four instances of whining and fussing, and two instances of running away and giggling instead of doing what he was told, all in the space of an hour and fifteen minutes), and I set about trying to be productive for the rest of the day.

My first stop was at the bank (though I did call to make an appointment to get my car tires changed, finally). I took the dog with me because he needed the exercise and because he was so excited when he saw me put on my running shoes to go to the bank that I didn't have the heart to tell him that I hadn't planned on taking him with me. So, happy dog was happy. I managed to straighten out the problem of the daycare check that the bank bounced, and was very pleased with the prompt, efficient service I received from the teller. They apologised (sort of), reversed all the charges and covered the fee the daycare will charge for a returned check, no muss, no fuss. If only all my problems were so easily solved.

I got home and cleaned the bathroom, and was about to start on the kitchen when pdaughter came back from school to wait for the Avon ladies to show up for their 14:30 meeting. As an aside, pdaughter is starting up her own Avon business again, so if anyone local wants the flyers for the current or future campaigns, by all means look us up! Avon has some really neat stuff, not just makeup and skin care products. You can look it up specifically on Facebook, where I encourage you to at least "like" her page, just in case. Father's Day is just around the corner, and there are all sorts of fun products and swag you can get for a very reasonable price!

Anyway, back to the exciting recounting of my day. :P I did a pretty thorough cleaning of the kitchen while we waited for the Avon ladies (they were well over an hour late due to traffic), including scrubbing down the cabinet under the kitchen sink, which had grown super scungy over the winter. We've been having trouble with ants for a few weeks, and I figured that cleaning things out down there certainly couldn't hurt. We have ant traps set up strategically, but we can't work out where they're coming from, cheeky little buggers. So right now we're mostly engaged in guerrilla warfare against the little formicidae foot soldiers. Ugh. If we knew where they were coming from we'd be able to put down corn starch and have done, but not dice. It's rather frustrating.

I headed out to do some last-minute grocery shopping before the Avon ladies arrived, but everyone was gone by the time I got home again. Despite getting caught in some pretty gnarly traffic I was still able to get dinner in the oven in a timely fashion. I don't think I've ever cleaned and chopped vegetables that fast in my whole life. I made chicken with roasted vegetables and made baked tomatoes as a side dish. Very paleo, I'm sure fearsclave would approve. ;)

Predictably, Bean's first reaction was: "But me not like that!" He demanded to have macaroni, then demanded "leftover pizza," and was upset when he was not presented with either of those options. I hadn't bothered giving him one of the baked tomatoes, figuring it would be met with shrieks of horror, but when he saw the one I'd given pdaughter he immediately insisted on having some, spurning the chicken, potatoes, carrots and green pepper already on his plate. After two small servings of tomato he then threw himself on the floor and wailed about being thirsty, and then whined and fussed and kicked at the nearest piece of furniture when he was instructed to eat a bit more before he'd be given more milk. It took some doing, but eventually we got him back into his chair, and after a bit more fussing he ate all his carrots, then tried the chicken and promptly finished that, and even managed a good number of his potatoes.

A pyrrhic victory, but one I'll take nonetheless.

Bean took a bath while I loaded the dishes into the dishwasher and put away the rest of dinner into Tupperware containers. We have enough for at least one other meal, which is nice. The food turned out delicious, if I do say so myself. The chicken was moist, the veggies crisp and savoury (though the carrots were a tad too crunchy for my liking—I'll try cutting them thinner the next time I make this dish).

Although he was wound tighter than a spring factory, Bean actually settled relatively quickly once he was properly in bed (there were a lot of false starts to that), and so we were actually able to start Game of Thrones at a decent hour, and now we're going crazy and watching CSI as well. Two TV shows in the same evening! Unheard of!

Tomorrow it's meant to rain, which will put a damper on my plans to do yard work. I may try to organise my paperwork instead, depending on the weather. I have been very bad about keeping my papers in any kind of semblance of order, and it's my newest May project, to get it all sorted out properly into my filing cabinet. That will definitely help when it comes time to sell the house/do my taxes/that sort of thing. If I have time I'm also going to head to Home Depot. I am determined to get the garden ship-shape this weekend and next weekend so that we can take advantage of it during the summer months.

And now, to finish CSI and pray that I'll actually be able to sleep tonight. Obviously when I mentioned almost wishing for insomnia the other day, I should have been more careful about what I wished for. :P

I'm feeling a bit more energetic these days. ( Light and energy. )

( Gardening, fencing and asphalt. )

( Paperwork. Blech. And also the prospect of selling books. )

So that's about it for now. I have other thoughts about time and procrastination and time management, but they're all still pretty rough, and not ready to be written down.

I'm feeling pretty optimistic about summer. Maybe it's the extra sunlight, maybe not, but I'm not complaining. I'm looking forward to the warmer weather and to getting outside more.