For one thing, TYG has this week off. She’s so relaxed when she doesn’t have to work, doesn’t have to worry about them calling her in for an emergency, doesn’t have to set her schedule to fit anyone else … While she always has lots of projects for her vacations, she doesn’t usually get many of them done but she accomplished much stuff this week.
And Tuesday she took the pets all day so I could have a day off of my own. I almost never manage a full day without pets demanding attention let alone timing it so I’m not working. We tried it last summer during her vacation but it didn’t work so well: there was a brief, routine dog checkup that morning, it appeared something was horribly wrong with Plushie’s eyes but it turned out it was a misreading by the doctor. Which was wonderful to hear but by the time we figured that out, the day was shot.
So Tuesday I took a long walk in the morning — it was the end of a brief cool spell here — then went and sat in the local cafe, Bean Trader’s, drank multiple cups of tea while doing some planning in my notebook, and reading without any dogs to distract me. Then I ran a couple of errands, hit the comic-book store — I very rarely get around to that — and as it’s current location was close to a Petco and a Target, went to them too. Didn’t buy anything at Ultimate Comics — the things I liked were too pricey for me just now (and I have a half-dozen TPBs I haven’t finished yet) — but I replaced our broken-down kitchen Lazy Susan with a new one and picked up a box of cat litter.
Then I came home and did various other things by myself the rest of the day. Way relaxing.
The rest of the week? Kind of chaotic. Monday Plushie had his recheck exam at the physical rehab place. His weight is down and his condition has improved overall so the exercise we’re doing clearly work, yay! But that did add an extra hour to our usual visit.
Wednesday we had a guy in to clean our dryer vent after TYG noticed the laundry closet steaming up when we used it. I thought I’d been tracking that as I do most of our recurring maintenance gigs but it looks like it’s been a couple of years. Good thing — turns out the hose had completely disconnected from the drier.
Plus I went to my dermatologist for an annual checkup that morning. Turns out I had a couple of potentially precancerous skin things so she froze them off. Stinging pain, but way better than the alternative.
Then Thursday we had the housecleaners in. As I’ve mentioned before, now that we have to keep Snowdrop and Wisp from running out, I wind up sitting in the upstairs bedroom with them (after we’ve chased them up there) for a couple of hours, plus the dogs.
The pets make it hard to write, and my brain’s sluggish when things wrap up so I’ve learned to block off several hours and assume I’m not getting any work done. This time it was even worse. We found a couple of wasps or hornets in the house this week —
— so we had the Orkin man give an inspection. It looks like they built a nest in our chimney; he took care of that and put some insecticide on the flue where it should keep them from coming in. Plus we had a general handyman we’ve used before come in because TYG wanted him to hang some pictures (trust me, it’s much easier to pay someone) and do a couple of other odds and ends. So I wound up in the bedroom longer and got my schedule even further thrown off. On the plus side, getting all that stuff out the way at once means we don’t have to deal with multiple disruptions.
Plus I wound up spending a lot of time working on Local Reporter articles — some of the stuff I’d anticipated didn’t come in so I had to scrounge around for alternatives. That can eat up time. I was pleased with my work though: one article on replacing a public works building flooded by Chantal, one on an expansion of the city cemetery.
All of that left me with relatively little time to do much else. I did get some work done watching stuff for Jekyll and Hyde but overall my work was a nothingburger. Though I did get some stuff posted at the Atomic Junk Shop (blogging happens outside regular work time) — one on a historical-fiction inaccuracy that annoys me, one on a couple of weird stories from 1970.
I must admit I do love that Gene Colan panel though.
Next week should be smoother. I have most of my interviewing and research done for my newspaper articles, there are no dog appointments as yet, and no appointments of my own. Fingers crossed.
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