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!
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