Hemlock B Bootsalotta

Oh hai it's October and you know what that means.



As I get older and more of my friends turn away from the bad habits of their youth, I have gotten more adamant that you don't actually have to drink to do this. I think of it like that 24-hour photography event or the 24-pages-in-24-hours comic drawing event - it's meant to shake you out of your usual routine to do something different with your art.

Which means to say, I drink all night because I'm an old pisspot, but you don't have to.

( Official Rules by the guy who came up with the idea in 2005 )

Everybody is invited to play along. I will be putting everything behind a cut and will tag everything with NaDruWriNi[2] so it will be easy to skip those posts if they don't interest you.

[1] Or instagram or bluesky or here or where-ever you hang out online. These rules were written ten+ years ago.
[2] All my old writings are still here if you are ever bored and curious at the same time and want to scroll through the old tags. I don't know if I would actually recommend doing this, but every once in a while I would pop out a story I still like.

Short updates:
I was right to expect overtime at the day job. I worked six days this past week and will probably do an extra shift again this coming week. Then we have a new hire starting the department so maybe things will slow down a bit.

***

In the evenings, it's back into the bog. Offspring came over three days and managed to get a ton of work done. She always starts early in the afternoon and I join her when I'm finished at work and things go so much faster when there are two sets of hands. So there is now a wide trench in the middle of the mountain leading to the back of the yard - still needs to come down about six inches but it's major progress.

I never did find that laser level - maybe the ex took it in the divorce. So instead I just staked some string from one side of the pit to the other and used the tried and trusted technique of eyeballing it.

***

Wednesday is a bank holiday so I'll be off work. Figured that would be a good day for the doctor's appointment. I always get high blood pressure readings at the doctor's office and it always takes them about half an hour of repeated testing to finally get a normal one. Nowhere else is this a problem, just when I'm at the doctor. So today I went to a drug store that has one of those cuff machines and printed off the results. I dunno why I didn't think of that years ago.

***

My dad is back in the hospital. I don't know even how to explain why, he just seems to be experiencing multiple system malfunctions at the same time. He sleeps most of the time, but he woke up for a few minutes while he was there and tried to talk to us. His wife said it was the most alert he's been all week, so maybe he's starting to recover? I don't know. He's more frail every time I see him.

***

The I Will Learn How To Cook, Dammit project continues. My usual breakfast is granola with yogurt and berries, so this week I tried my hand at making home-made granola using a recipe that claimed to taste like carrot cake. It's full of grated carrot which is something I have never had in granola before. It turned out SO GOOD I was eating handfuls off the tray. It came out soft instead of crunchy so I will need to tweak the actual cooking part, but man. Who knew eating carrots for breakfast would be such an easy sell.

***

Things that left the house this week: Two spider plants and the syringes that were left in my library box. I was not able to re-home them before they expired, so I dropped them into the needle disposal box at the drop-in centre.

Things that entered my house this week: An end of life planner. I guess dad's health problems got my sister thinking about her own mortality, because she bought one for herself and got a copy each for the Wicked Stepmother and me at the same time. It is titled, in flowing script on a black background decorated with a flowered wreath, "FUCK! I'M DEAD. Now what?" and I laughed my ass off when she handed it to me.

Last week was a gauntlet. I worked overtime at my day job, spent every evening after work hauling dirt, and squeezed everything from grocery runs to haircuts in the spaces in between. Then Saturday morning I threw a change of clothes into a bag and drove to the bustling town of Fenwick and watched Second Nephew get married in a meadow. Yesterday I drove a car full of extremely hung-over millennials back to the city. I picked up a calzone on my way home from dropping off my girlfriend's car and ate dinner on the couch with a cat in my lap.

Decided on a shower before bed. Discovered Lord Brock had pooped in my shower at some point during the weekend.

This week I am on vacation from the day job. Brock has a vet check-up and I'm chaperoning dad while his wife has cataract surgery. The rest of my week is going to be more dirt-hauling, so hopefully I can make a dent in this bloody endless task. (I am not optimistic enough to think I can actually finish it, but I am definitely going to give it the old college try.)

***

(Momentary pause in typing when I discover that Lord Brock threw up under my desk - in the exact spot where my feet rest. Repairs have been made.)

***

Saturday night we stayed at a motel near to the orchard where the wedding was being held. It was probably built in the 50s, we rolled into the parking lot and The Offspring said, "Wow, I feel like I've just entered Twin Peaks." It was spotlessly clean, incredibly cheap, and quirky as hell. The owner (or manager maybe, but she gave owner vibes) was incredibly nice and the check-in process was hilarious. "You are in room 12, when you enter there is a light switch by the door, you need to turn that on to get the TV to work. Now you are in room 11, there is a light switch by the door, don't touch that, you have to turn on the lamp at the desk instead." First Nephew reported that there were similar detailed instructions to get hot water in their shower.

Proximity was the main reason I picked this place - it was a 4 minute drive and according to the map a 40-minute walk. That never got confirmed because I made the mistake of telling people I was going to walk back and they lost their minds. I'm convinced they would have tackled me to prevent it.

I was drunk, but it was the level of drunk where a walk sobers me up, not the level of of drunk where a nap by the side of the road seems like a good idea. I had good shoes, a flashlight, and I knew where I was going. Chainsaw-wielding murder cults are highly unlikely outside of the movies, I come from a city where the cars are actively trying to kill you, and the most dangerous animal I'm likely to run into is a skunk.

Nope. Second Nephew made me up a bed on the couch and I guess I'm a worse liar than I thought, because he looked me in the eyes and said, "You're going to leave as soon as I go to bed, aren't you?" and I had to confess. He actually managed to find an Uber driver at something like 4 in the morning through outright bribery - I'm half convinced the guy got out of bed to come get me.

He's never going to let me live it down, either. He mentioned it four times when we went back to say goodbye the next day.

I have learned two things from this experience:

Don't tell people shit

I really gotta work on my poker face

***

The wedding itself was great fun. Second Nephew and Wife have an incredibly diverse friend group. Old punks on mushrooms, people they know from sailing, a guy who looks & sounds exactly like a young John Hamm. Many adorable children dressed up for the occasion and some very friendly drool-y dogs. The officiant was a dead ringer for Stanley Tucci. There were chairs for people who needed them and the rest of us sat on blankets spread out of the grass. The bride wore leopard-print.

So. Much. Food.

The woman who rents the apartment in Sister's house is a PSW and a nursing student so Sister hired her for the day to drive Dad and Wife and to take care of him so Wife could socialize. Dad Wife has anxiety, and I ended up having to mute her texts just so I could drive without interruption. Everything was fine - they set up a chair for him on the deck of the house so he wouldn't have to navigate the grass and he sat up above us all and waved like the Queen. The PSW was delightful and kind and took them home after dinner.

I still think the City Hall wedding I went to earlier this year was the most tearful & sweetest one, but this one definitely wins on the quirky and fun and sitting-around-a-big-fire talking-about-bands afterwards scale.

***

Offspring arrived while I was typing this, so we spent the day hauling more dirt. Every surface in my house is once again covered in grit. Such is life.

Another week older and deeper in debt.

Today I went over to dad's place to see if I could be of use. I helped with some unpacking, did some tape measuring of spaces to help with decisions around ordering furniture, carted empty boxes and trash down to the recycling, and was the designated tall person when boxes need to be retrieved from stacks or things to keep were put into the storage locker. Then I hung out with dad while The Wicked Step Mother did a grocery run for things she can't get close by.

The new condo seems to be working out well. NO STAIRS. Dad has an en-suite bathroom so he's not getting lost when he gets up in the middle of the night. Their main grocery store is across the street, so TWSM is taking him with her for a short daily walk and he's been doing really well with it.

That specific stress-meter can be dialed back to a 4.

***

Daughter came over twice this week and that was enough time to finish the digging out of the drainage pit. I got past the sand layer into Yet More Fucking Clay so that was when I said right, 5.5 feet (ish) is deep enough. I shaped it into a rough V and now we are filling it with gravel.

Now that the highly hazardous part is out of the way I can go back to going outside and working on it for an hour or so during the week.

***

I came home one day last week to a hand-written flyer stuffed into my mailbox offering to clean my bins for $5 each. The houses in Toronto get three bins, one for compost which is collected weekly, and two for garbage and recycling, which alternate. The compost bin especially gets rank in the summer and I had been meaning to give it a scrub for months and never got around to it. So I'm like yeah, that's a reasonable price, I'll do it. And I texted the number on the paper.

I'm not sure what I expected. What I got was a very serious kid of maybe 13 years of age? (I suck at children's ages, but he looked like he would be around the same age as the gang of supposed 11 year-olds in Good Omens.) He brought a power washer, spoke authoritatively about psi and the merits of metal vs plastic hoses, and when he was done asked me very seriously, "How would you rate my service?" I was utterly charmed, tipped him well, and will probably text him next summer to see if he's still doing it.

***

The bird feeder I put on my window is now my favourite daily soap opera. The sparrows have gone from a half dozen to thirty or so little gangsters, fighting and yelling about who gets to be the one to sit in the feeder and toss seeds down to their fellow bruisers.

The cardinal shows up two or three times a day and there is much squawking and huffing when she shows up. She's about twice their size and will chase them all off so she can sit and daintily eat her seeds without dropping a single one.

Once a bluejay showed up. I have never seen one that close before and had no idea how much bigger they are - easily over twice the size of the cardinal. I think he just showed up to see what all the fuss was about, because he grabbed a few seeds but hasn't been back.

Then yesterday I was brushing my teeth and could hear the usual clattering and squawking that meant the cardinal was throwing her weight around - then a loud thump and an exceptionally loud burst of upset bird voices. So I went to have a look.

There was a wild turkey on my deck.



She hung around for a while. Ate all the scattered seeds, took a long dust-bath in the pile of dirt in the yard. Ate some bugs. Then wandered off.

(For context, in downtown Toronto one sees rats, raccoons, skunks, and coyotes regularly. Rabbits and foxes frequently. Possums and groundhogs occasionally. The turkey is new.)

***

Have started watching The Other Bennet Sister with the GF. So far I'm enjoying it, it's an enjoyable tribute to Austin's characters.

I think we're 4 episodes in? So far I just really want Mary to get past the point where she falls for every man she spends more than five minutes in a room with. I have never seen a woman who needed to get laid quite so badly as she does, but given that isn't available to her at least developing an actual social life would be the next best thing.

The daughter and I have just started Ride or Die. Hannah Waddingham plays an assassin and she's so James Bond coded it's hilarious. In the first episode she literally kills a guy, escapes on skis, and then picks up the bartender at the ski resort. It's the usual mindless buddy adventure film but it did make me laugh out loud a number of times.

And the way it centres female relationships is something I don't usually see in media. Not just the two central main characters, but there is a scene in a hostel where they are hunting down a con-man, and they tell the other girls in the hostel it's one of their ex-husbands - using the story of how the actual husband asked for a divorce. All the 20-somethings are so outraged they unite in an act of solidarity and hunt this guy down through an instagram photo. The scene is very Hollywood, but the actual dynamic is one I've encountered in women's bathrooms at clubs more than once so the spirit of it is very real.

Octavia Spencer plays the best friend. Having two middle-aged women who are treated as attractive by the narrative, especially two women who are not Hollywood skinny - definitely a thing I approve of and would like to see more often.

Last of household stuff cleared out[1]. Floors swept, garbage taken out, doors locked.

Wicked step-mother was released from hospital with a diagnosis that is painful but not dangerous. She was prescribed painkillers and told to follow up with her GP on Monday. Then while she was in the pharmacy getting her scrip filled my dad wandered away and security had to be called. Fortunately they tracked him down before he made it outside.

Obviously no unpacking got done in the condo but there is a supermarket at the next intersection so sister and I went and picked up ready-made food at the deli counter[2] and got everybody fed.

Sister is staying the night so she can help unpack and run errands tomorrow. Then she's gone for vacation for two weeks and I'll be prime support unit until she gets back.

I just got home and I am not kidding, my bad foot feels like somebody is stabbing my heel with a knife repeatedly.

I'm not going to say I'm done for the weekend because I have LEARNED MY LESSON about tempting fate[3]. But I am going to drink wine and not think about it for one night.

[1]I found a surprising amount of stuff left behind, more than I could carry. First Lyft driver said no and to be fair his car had a tiny trunk. Second one was a little worried but he let me fill the passenger compartment as well and then perch on the remaining seat space cross-legged because the floor space was full of Stuff.
[2] And a fuck-off big bottle of wine for us.
[3] I would like to say I have also learned my lesson about keeping up with my physio, but I'd be lying. But I will definitely be doing it tomorrow because fucking ow.

I am sooooooooooooo tired.

I was at my dad's place three time this past week - on Saturday we hauled their BBQ away to a friend who just bought in the neighbourhood. On Monday I went over and spent hours cleaning out their shed and packing up boxes from their kitchen.

And today was the big move. My sister, her husband and I arrived at 8:30 in the morning and the movers were already there and every surface in the house was still covered in stuff. We spent several hours going through the rooms and just sweeping armloads of things into boxes and bags. The movers started with the boxes that had already been packed while we worked to clean off the furniture.

My sister and BIL used their pickup to haul shit all over town - furniture to Habitat for Humanity, stuff I'm taking for the basement, moving things out of the storage unit. Then we went to the condo and met the truck while they loaded an entire house worth of stuff into this little apartment.

It is FULL. I unpacked about a dozen big boxes labeled "kitchen" and ran out of places to put things. There are at least a dozen left that I never got to. My sister hunted down their bedding and got their beds set up for the night. We sorted out their food so it's in the fridge.

And that's all we got done because we couldn't find anything. It's just wall to wall boxes.

I got home at 9 PM and ordered delivery because I was too tired to make a damn sandwich. Every single part of my body hurts. I haven't had a move like that since a bunch of my friends played Hermit Crabs with their apartments and I helped move three people in the same day.

On the plus side: Every single person we ran into in the halls and elevators introduced themselves. They have a quiz night, a book club, and regular social get-togethers and it seems to be mostly seniors who live there so I'm hoping they have lots of social outlets while they are living there.

Plus Side Number Two: The movers were amazing. They busted their asses, the were patient, they were considerate, they were careful. A couple of things got dinged in the process, they immediately brought them over to show us what happened. They made a point of making sure stuff went into the right rooms while they were unloading, both boxes and furniture. If you are in Toronto and you ever need professional movers, Six Moving are such good guys.

I am taking tomorrow entirely off. Sunday my sister is going to help clean up the house for the Monday close. Next weekend I'll go back to the condo and help with whatever is needed after a week of unpacking boxes and getting services turned on. But at least D day happened and that's one big stress item I can cross off my list.

Today is my last day as host of Write Every Day. Tomorrow we move over to zwei_hexen. Between September and December we still need hosts, so feel free to volunteer in the comments or at the master list. You can even volunteer to take half a month if a full one seems too daunting.

Another 500 words last night - in something new I just started because of course I did.

Day 31 Tally
ysilme

Day 30 Tally
badly_knitted trobadora sylvanwitch glinda goddess47 sanguinity dswdiane cornerofmadness garonne ysilme the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.

Last night was TV night with the gf, so only an alibi sentence for me. We continue to watch Widows Bay. I loved the cocktail party, absolutely something that would just randomly happen during any pagan drinking night.

(  more TV shows )

Day 29 Tally


Day 28 Tally
badly_knitted glinda trobadora goddess47 sylvanwitch cornerofmadness sanguinity dswdiane shippen_stand the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.

Yesterday was chores day so not much else happened. I did spend some time compiling dates and paperwork for a lawyer, so I can strike that off my to-do list. (Long story. I'm looking into suing my contractor and/or the engineer who worked for him.)

Writing was some editing and about 200 new words

Today I was thinking I would do some digging but it has just started to rain and it looks like it's going to be an energetic one so we'll see if it's still going when I log off job.

Day 27 Tally
china_shop

Day 26 Tally
sanguinity badly_knitted goddess47 china_shop glinda trobadora cornerofmadness garonne dswdiane ysilme the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.

Visited my dad yesterday. Came home and made dinner, then opened some wine and wrote 750 words on a book review. Had to do all of it with a cat in my lap fighting to get his head between my fingers and the keyboard.

There's a flea market going on today not too far from me. Trying to decide if I want to drop by.

Day 25 Tally
china_shop

Day 24 Tally
badly_knitted sanguinity trobadora china_shop sylvanwitch cornerofmadness dswdiane goddess47 the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.