Hemlock B Bootsalotta

For faithful readers who have not been to my house, it's a brick building in one of the older working-class neighbourhoods of Toronto, now very gentrified. I say "brick", but that excludes the kitchen, which is actually is a 107 year-old wooden shack barely hanging onto the back wall.

The kitchen is the last part of the building that has not yet been renovated. It has no insulation and no wiring, so our fridge, microwave, and coffee maker all run off extension cords. There are two species of ants in the walls and a paper wasp colony living in the ceiling. (Every once in a while a very confused wasp will fall out of the light fixture and have to be shooed outside.) The shingles on the outside are peeling off because the wood is literally too rotted to stick to and this past summer I discovered a yellow-jacket colony had made a home under one of them. So when we do deal with it, that will mean a complete tear down and rebuild, which we expect to fall into the approximate realm of 2.8 truckloads of money.

If we're doing that anyway, we figure we can make it a bit bigger (it's currently only half the width of the rest of the house) and that will mean we can do some flood mitigation in the basement while we have the walls opened up. Given that the entire back wall will be open while the work is being done, it seems likely we won't actually be able to live here while it's happening.

We've talked tentatively about the idea that the work should best happen between Basement DJ moving out and Axe's girlfriend moving in, logic-ing that figuring out housing for 2 people would be cheaper than 3.

Well now Basement DJ has announced that he and his gf are thinking of getting a place together in the spring / early summer.

On the one hand -

1. Axel's only been employed full time for about six months and we don't have nearly enough money saved up. This would mean dipping into debt
2. We're in a fucking pandemic

On the other hand -

1. If we're not in the house anyway, having workman bringing their poison breath into the house is less of a big deal
2. There's no tourism so getting a B&B for both us plus the cats for two months (or whatever) will be way cheaper.

Arrgh.

The cats are driving me bonkers.

It's not their fault, of course. They have no idea where all their humans have gone.

But it's not my fault either, and if a human followed me around and yelled at me the entire time I was in the house I'd have pitched them onto the street by now.

Work is so busy. I am one of the two people dealing with a major software upgrade and one of three people dealing with a major process change. Of the two people team, my co-worker will be on vacation the week we are scheduled for testing. Of the three people team I'm the only one who has done this process before. I still have my daily work while this is going on of course, plus some additional minor projects that I can't really punt. Out of my other co-workers, one left a couple of weeks ago and one is leaving at the end of next week so their stuff is being spread out among the rest of the team. Oh and my boss has been off work for the last six months.

To say I'm feeling a little stretched would be entirely accurate.

My mother's husband is moving into a residence the end of next week. Before that happens we have to clear out the garage and pack up as much as we can so we can move out all the furniture that isn't being used to stage the house. After he's moved we then have ten days to clear out the excess furniture, paint, and clean, so it's ready to show.

Really my sister has been doing most of the work. She's been staying at the house and doing things like taking Jim to choose the residence, doctor's appointments, trips to buy the things he needs, and of course cooking and packing for him. I've been handling the side of contacting accounts, paying bills and dealing with paperwork. (So. Much. Paperwork.) Once we start prepping the house though, it's going to need all hands on deck. Axe gets on a plane next week to go to England. My sister is leaving the day before the house hits the market. Then I'll be the one helping Jim with closing the sale, setting up his accounts, getting his taxes filed and the fifty billion other little things that are no doubt just over the horizon but that I haven't thought of yet.

Does that look like a lot? Because it sure as hell feels like a lot. I have, on more than one occasion, sat in the dark in my bedroom and whispered, "I can't do this. Holy shit, there's the wall, I've just found it, I can't do this."

And then I got up and I did it. So obviously I can, it's just... it's a lot.

I saw some graffiti yesterday that said "colonialism does not spark joy"

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It was so humid and hot yesterday that when I was walking from the bus there was actually condensation forming on my exposed skin. Because I was cooler and dryer than the atmosphere surrounding me.

That is a fucked-up thing for a mammal to be saying, but this is my Canada in 2019.

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The thing about all this water in the air is that occasionally the sky decides to dump it all out. And in the continuing saga of Shit That Is Falling Off Our House, the kitchen ceiling has been leaking really really badly.

For those of you who haven't heard the story; our kitchen is actually a wooden shack tacked onto the back of our brick house. It's at least 100 years old, the wood is rotten, there is at least one paper wasp nest in the walls, and I figure a few carpenter ant nests as well. We've been trying to hold off on spending more than the minimum on patching it up because the long-term plan is to tear it down and build something with insulation and wiring and fewer non-rent-paying lodgers. But you know, when it starts raining inside the house (and brown gross sticky rain at that) it's time to bite the bullet and throw some money away.

So Axe calls the service that provides out contractors, they contact a roofing company, people come out and look, prices are agreed to, dates are set, our neighbours are informed. And then the roofers just... never show up.

A week of phone tag later, Axe calls the service and tells them to send somebody else because this group are incompetent. What probably actually happened is that they got a bigger job for more money and figured they could quietly dump us as unimportant. Which I kinda get, but at least be honest with us that you don't have time to do the work.

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And while this is going on, on the other side of town my mother's dining room ceiling just fell in. Fortunately nobody was sitting at the dining room table at the time. She filed an insurance claim and they're saying they don't have to pay for it because of bullshit reasons. My mother is not one to back down easily and I have no doubt she'll get the money out of them, but for fuck's sake. Making a senior citizen jump through these hoops is just fucking unconscionable.

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Speaking of insurance I had to give all D's insurance paperwork to his mother to deal with as the executor. I felt bad about it because it's such a nightmare. She told me she is instructing her lawyer to tell them to piss up a rope. (Not in those words obviously.)

Somebody should tell these insurance companies not to mess with the 80 year old women. They will come for you.

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Axe is out of town helping his gf move this weekend and I'm just kind of rattling around the house. I have to finish laundry and throw some more stuff on craigslist and then my chores are pretty much taken care of. I might try to do some writing. It's been months since I've felt like it but it would be nice to focus on something that isn't the inside of my own head for a while.

Back in court with all the other rejects. Apparently everybody else has also figured out that these things never start when they tell you, I wandered in at quarter past and I was one of the earliest to arrive.

It's also quite comfortable in the waiting room today. I guess a building this massive just takes a while to cool off after a weekend of sitting empty.

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I am so utterly done with this place and this climate. I'm spending $60 a month on medication just to try and breathe. I am done with feeling like I've inhaled a wet sweat-sock. I'm done with not being able to sleep, and migraines and skin rashes from the fucking heat.

We spent the first 10 years in this house using nothing fans and that was enough. But each year the summers get hotter and longer and I just can't fucking do it any more. And Canada obviously doesn't give a shit about anything but extracting as much money out of the ground as possible to make sure oil companies continue to turn a profit.

I don't even like air conditioning but it's now moved to the head of the list of things to spend money on the next time we have some[1]. I just wish to fuck I could charge the cost to the fuckers who just cancelled all the wind and solar projects.



[1]Ha ha ha ha. That's a whole 'nother rant.

So the saga of the tree has finally reached it's thrilling conclusion. Metrolinx sent some workman, who stood on the other side of the fence, talked to each other for a half an hour - and then left. After several more days I emailed them and got the response that "there is some question about ownership". I read that to mean "We are going to faff for at least another month and then tell you we're not going to do anything."

So fuck them. Thursday D went out and bought a small chainsaw. The tree is now in big chunks all over our yard. I guess I should call Bell, since their cables are still dangling in our back yard.

Since D has been out in the back yard so much in the past month, he's been letting the cats outside for some supervised sunbathing time. He mentioned to me that Jack was really interested in one of the plants growing out there - didn't eat it, but took a couple of nips at the leaves. Cats eat grass all the time, I thought nothing of it.

After the first time they went outside, we agree that as a precautionary measure they should go to the vet to get their shots updated and make sure they were both chipped. We noticed Jack seemed really off his food afterwards - we chalked it up to feeling crappy after getting his vaccinations and he would feel better in a couple of days. Except he didn't get over it. In fact as the days went by he kept getting worse. I sat on the floor with him one night petting him while he lay on the kitchen tile and he was so obviously sick and miserable and this... little bell just went off in my head. And I went to the computer and looked up plants that are poisonous to cats and said, "Oh FUCK!

Long story short, he spent four nights in the hospital getting his system flushed out with fluids. He came home on Saturday and is obviously still feeling pretty shitty, but he is drinking water and eating a little. He will probably have kidney problems when he gets older.

We moved the plant. I'm going to make a point of identifying all of the plants before we let either of them outside again.

Almost home going time!

It took me over an hour and a half to get home last night. Keep in mind that this is less than 10 km. And I travel at non-peak time, because getting on my bus before 9 AM is an exercise in, "I wonder if this one will have room."

Part of the problem is that it's construction season[1] in Toronto. I should be used to this after so many years of living in the city, but it never ceases to be a pain. This year they are building some kind of transit building right on my route to work (A new station maybe? For the Eglington line?) and of course Dufferin is always being repaired because it's one of the busiest routes in the city and it's always torn to garbage. Cycling on it is a complete shitshow.

Torontoist published an article a few months ago (that I can't find now, of course) talking about how the city keeps giving contracts to companies that repeatedly screw up the work. Road re-pavings are supposed to last for five years, anybody who drives here knows a city street barely makes it through one-freeze thaw cycle. There are companies that fuck up so badly they get fined for it and yet they still get the work year after year. Because they submit the lowest bid and that is the sole criteria the city is allowed to use when awarding contracts.

It's a ridiculous situation - it probably ends up costing twice as much and it explains why we have to deal with massive construction delays in the exact same spots every single summer. But I can't really see where the current setup provides much impetus to change. Why would a city councilor push to spend money during their own tenure when you know some idiot like one of the Ford brothers is going to come in afterwards and just coast on the work their predecessor invested?

On the plus side, I'm working overtime for the next little while. Getting home is a lot faster when everybody else is already home from work.

Oh shit, wait... You know what else is coming?

Christmas shopping traffic.

**shudder**


[1]Construction season, of course, runs right up to the start of weather season. Some years they overlap.

So because my co-workers are lovely, they got me going-away presents. One of them was a pie, which was delicious and they helped me eat it.

The other part of the present was a gift card for Indigo, which is a Canadian book store. "Aha!" says I, "I can finally buy some of the books that are on my wish list." And because we are trying to reduce the number of Things, I went online and created an account on the Indigo website and bought the electronic version of some of the books I wanted.

Now the Indigo e-reader is called a Kobo. When I buy the books the Indigo website ports me over to Kobo to create an account there. This concerns me a little as I don't have a Kobo, I have a Kindle. Not to worry, says the website, you can convert the files using a free Adobe app. So I download the Adobe app. Then I try to convert them so they can be read on my Kindle. Adobe app says nope, those files have DRM. I do a search on the Adobe website, which says, well if you register your Adobe app you can share the files across devices. Fine, I didn't particularly want to have to create yet another account with a third company, but whatever. I register the Adobe app. I download the books again. Adobe app says that's nice, now you have two copies of the files but they still have DRM so I can't put them on your Kindle.

Axel downloads a DRM-breaker. DRM breaker says it could convert the files if it were the previous version of the Adobe app but not this new version.

We collectively say fuckit and torrent the fucking books.

Keep in mind that these are books that I legally purchased, and would like to be able to read on an existing e-reader that I already own, and after hours of nonsense we still couldn't get them into my Kindle. It took all of three minutes to just download an illegal copy, convert it, and bam I'm good to go.

And this is why people pirate shit.

Who has two thumbs and picked up a pounding head cold 48 hours before getting on a plane?

Reading the comments to this letter reassures me that I am not alone on the "just let me do my fucking work that you pay me for and then go the fuck home" bus.

I Do Not Like the recent trend towards wanting work to be "fun". I do not go to work to have fun, I go to work to get paid. Also my co-workers' idea of fun makes me want to chew my own leg off to get away from it.