(no subject)
This has to be the most hilariously unlucky move attempt ever. I mean, at this point I've gone far beyond the crying and shaking stage and am right into the hysterical laughter stage. Every one more thing wrong was like another pie in the face.
Whenever I'm tempted to ask how my karma got so bad to deserve all this, I try to spin it to, "This is the universe letting me know that our time there will be so great and amazing that we have to pay in advance for this unfair amount of good luck and joy". Sometimes that works, but most of the time it sounds like complete bullshit.
The 30th was the first day of big moving, while the next day (the first) was reserved for final cleaning. We never leave a house dirty, and our motto has always been to aim to leave a place better than we found it (within reason, I mean we're not going to repaint the entire place to fix every slight chip or something) and over the time we've lived here we've discovered quite a few things that were never done prior to us moving in… like cleaning under the fridge, or washing the drapes; I always thought they were brown, but it turns out they are beige.
Horrible mishap #1: We got the keys to the new place a few days prior to the 30th and were given permission to start moving stuff in whenever we wanted, so Curtis started doing drops of boxes in effort to clear some space in our (old) house for more cleaning duty and stacking boxes.
At the end of his second drop, he was coming down the stairs and slipped, rotating his ankle 90 degrees and putting all his weight on it. He said the pops he heard were so loud it was echoing off the walls. He didn't admit this at the time, but later told me that he was genuinely frightened that he would not be able to make it home. Never in his life has he hurt himself that badly.
He sat against the wall for a good 15 minutes trying to wait for the pain to subside (it didn't) before limping back to the car and making his way home. By the time he got back there was a lump on the side of his foot bigger than a baseball and the pain was so bad he couldn't bear weight on the foot at all. I forced him to lay down and alternate ice and heat every 20 minutes until we both succumbed to exhaustion. Just before I fell asleep I had him swear up and down he'd go to the clinic the next morning.
He did end up going, although very reluctantly, and the verdict was that it's very badly sprained and he has a torn ligament, but at least it's not broken so he can probably avoid crutches. His foot looked so bad by the next day - oh my god - half of it was black and the other half stained red like someone coloured on his skin with Sharpie markers. The only other time I've seen bruising that bad was when my mom got in a (not very bad) accident and her car's airbag deployed and absolutely beat the ever-loving shit out of her face and breast.
It was rather terrifying to look at. Even three of his toes turned black.
The doctor told him he'd have to take time off work and Curtis replied that time off was not an option in our universe; so instead he was given a buttload of pills, a tensor bandage and told to ice it 4x a day and do as little with it as he can. Naturally this advice was immediately thrown aside and he went back out to do more box drops. FUCKING CURTIS, GODDAMMIT.
Over the next few days it was a ridiculous tug-o-war between the two of us to convince the other to lay down and rest, or not push ourselves too hard. With Curtis half-incapacitated, and my back doing so bad that I could barely move 70% of the time, it was a genuine miracle the house was even half-way done.
I swear to god, Curtis was not this stubborn when I met him. It used to take hours just to convince him a slight cough was not reason enough to curl up and die. When I jokingly asked him, "Where did you learn to be this way?"
He responded dramatically, "You, alright? I learned it from watching you!"
Oh, fuck you Curtis.
His entire "weekend" off work was spent madly packing, cleaning, and taking alternating shifts taking care of the children, having short breaks, and doing endless amounts of work. It made it feel like we had no time off at all - probably because we didn't - so by the end we were both really on edge. Moving tends to put an incredible strain on relationships anyway, but we also hadn't managed to have sex in like two weeks due to my mouth surgery plus all of this shit, so that really didn't help. These days two weeks is practically two years for us, so the sexual frustration levels were quickly skyrocketing.
On one of the final days I felt like I did nothing but scream at my kids for 20 continuous hours. I felt so bad about it that I tried to make it up to them the next day by allowing roughly 8 hours of screen time while I worked. I spent most of this time so stressed out I could barely hold my shit together. Even going to bed at night was impossible without a constant stream of anxiety nightmares. The nightmares don't even make sense, either. I mean it was all weird, random shit like not being able to find my way through somebody's basement. I found another wall, cue life-ending panic attack and wake up drenched in sweat!
Horrible mishap #2: My dad was helping to front our security deposit for the new place until we sorted out what was happening with the old one (hint: more court!), and we had originally planned on having the rest of it dropped off to the property manager on the last Friday before move-in day. When I called him to check on that, he reminded me that he was in Kelowna all week and won't be back until Monday (the first). Which is also when the trailer is reserved for (his vehicle has a hitch and ours doesn't, so he offered to rent the trailer instead since he can actually pull it).
On top of that, Curtis just had to fire someone at work for being a huge douchebag (seriously what kind of asshole tells his superiors that if he isn't given a requested day off during one of the busiest times, that he'll just "not show up"?), which means he has to pull double shifts two days in a row to cover for the loss. Both of those days were OUR MOVING DAYS, gifting us with Horrible Mishap #3.
So all those wonderful schedules we had flawlessly set up weeks in advance to ensure that moving day was as low stress as possible? Yeah, they're all gone now. Now it was just little disabled me, all by myself, doing everything … somehow… until Curtis got home at anywhere from 6-9pm.
This was a pretty panic-inducing thing, and I was absolutely freaking the fuck out until one of my closest friends saved the day by offering to help me out up until Curtis got off work. She single-handedly saved the move from being my worst nightmare, and instead downgraded it to "a catastrophe" instead. This was a significant improvement.
Of course, as soon as she arrived, the worst storm of the year started and our windshield wipers don't work properly (Horrible Mishap #4) so we did most of the back-and-forth drops while fearing for our lives. But at least the kids were all being looked after during this so their presence wasn't adding to that stress.
(Mishaps #5 through #9) Z had obviously picked up on all the stress and was behaving like she was on drugs. The last night of the move she started that cyclic toddler mess-making thing where they create some horrific mess and while you're cleaning that up they start in on another one. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And unless you're fortunate enough to have someone to take them out of the house for you, this continues until you finally lose our goddamn mind. We call this the perpetual mess machine, and it is a skill unique to 2 year olds.
The first plague began as the Elders and Z were all sitting on the couch zoning out to Digimon or something. I asked Tempest to be in charge of watching the baby for two minutes while I walked into the other room to put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I was gone literally 120 seconds. I did nothing but walk in, spin a dial, dump two armfuls of clothes in the machine, and then walk back.
As I returned to the kitchen I was immediately hit with a wall of carpet cleaner smell. As in the expensive carpet cleaner soap that came with our carpet shampoo machine rental. When I rounded the corner into the living room I saw Zephyra standing naked (she was clothed when I walked away two minutes earlier) with a nearly-empty bottle of carpet cleaner in her hands. The rest was spread out in a big sudsy pool stretching from the kitchen, outward through the living room. ALL OF IT. Wall to fucking wall.
And where were the elders who were supposed to be helping out? Nowhere to be found, of course.
Apparently they saw a dog walk by - I'm not even kidding - and they leapt off the couch and ran outside to ask the owner if they could pet it. At the very least they locked the door behind them, believing that to be the most responsible solution.
I briefly chased Z around the incredibly slippery room (thank god it was sealed hardwood) and after another minute finally managed to wrest the bottle from her hands. She immediately flopped onto the floor in a tearful heap, and continued to lay there with her head in her hands for 15 minutes, screaming and moaning in anguish while I carefully sponged up as much of the cleaner as possible and squeezed it back into the bottle. I saved about half of it. It took 35 minutes.
The second plague of toddler destruction came in the form of kafir lime leaves. I don't even know how she got ahold of these things. We have two bags of them leftover from god knows what and they were already packed away in a box that remained taped shut until after we moved in and unpacked the kitchen, but SOMEHOW she got both bags out of it. She's like a fucking messy Houdini.
I was cleaning the kitchen cabinets when I heard a strange crunching noise. I looked up and saw a small trail of dried leaves that Xan was very purposefully stepping on, delicately moving from one to the next, crushing each into smithereens all over the floor. I got up to yell at him about it, believing that he'd dragged them in from the yard, but as I stepped over the baby gate I realized that the leaves extended far beyond the little row Xan had walked over. They were spread all over the couch, the floor in front of the couch, and were scattered throughout most of the living room. There were hundreds of them. I don't even understand how that many fit into the little freezer bags they'd been stored in!
I was completely dumbfounded.
I made Xan clean up most of it due to his deliberate crunching, and held the baby aside while he finished. I put her down briefly so I could help sweep the remaining debris into a dust pan, and once I was finished I walked back into the kitchen to throw it away and saw that baby had managed to climb up onto the counter, into the cupboard and grab a tin of cocoa powder. In the time it took me to sweep up the lime leaves into a dust bin she had spread cocoa powder from wall to wall in the kitchen. Everything was brown: her body, the floor, the cupboards, the counters, the walls… EVERYTHING.
I picked up the baby and threw her in the bath to rinse the cocoa out of her hair, then let her go briefly to sit in the mostly empty guest bedroom with Tempest while I cleaned up the cocoa.
When I went to get her in there, I realized Tempest had gone into another room some time before, and left behind the second coming of kafir lime leaves. It seemed as though she'd stashed half a bag in there somewhere between her first two adventures, and now that one was spread and crushed all over the room. Wall to wall.
So I put her back in the living room with the Elders, locked all adjoining doors, secured the baby gate to the kitchen and swept up that room.
By the time I dumped the bin out, I could already hear Tempest's, "Uh-oh… Mommy?"
One litre of water all over the living room floor, picking up the remnants of the lime leaves and any other food particles I may have missed. Wall to wall in the living room. She had climbed a bookshelf to get ahold of my water bottle and learned how to unscrew the top.
By the end of that run I was actually crying.
All of that took place within 15 minutes.
But it wasn't just me that had a horrible time. Horrible Mishap #10 was when Curtis got out of work and went to retrieve his bike, finding that not only had the handlebars been stolen, but in the process the thief had cut or ripped off every single wire and line.
… why handlebars?
The following morning all the remaining lights in the kitchen burnt out (not quite horrible, but still counts as Mishap #11), and they're this weird 'lifetime warranty' kind that requires a special tool to get out of their socket (which crazy/current landlady has). So there's that. We did the last remnants of packing and cleaning (all of which were centred in the kitchen) in near darkness.
By the time we reached the end of the first move night (the 30th) I was so happy to be done with the worst of it that I didn't care about anything else anymore. I felt numbed to any other disasters, and assured myself that nothing else could possibly get to me at this point. I've reached the absolute pinnacle of anxiety of bullshit.
And of course, now that I've said that… Mishap #12.
My father helped with the last load of boxes and it was late enough that Curtis and him just started piling them haphazardly around the living room to be dealt with later. All we wanted was to stop and go to bed. One of the boxes he left lying around held all of our cleaning supplies, including a bottle of Clorox bleach. I didn't see him bring this one in, and did not think to remind him to put it in a closet somewhere and not within the baby's reach.
Within five minutes of his unloading the last few boxes, Tempest remarked, "Why does it smell like a pool?" and before I could say, "Whaa?" the baby came running up to me going, "Yucky!".
It didn't take long for me to put two and two together and promptly start freaking the fuck out, believing that she had been drinking the bleach. I scrambled through the house looking for the evidence to back this up before I went too far off the deep end, and eventually came upon the box of cleaning supplies that my father had put on the floor next to a hall closet. The bleach was the only thing removed from the box, and the top was off. I could smell it, but couldn't see anywhere it had been spilled. Z wandered over and I meticulously checked her clothes, hair, hands and smelled her breath. She had no bleach or liquid spills on her body, none on her clothes (if she'd drank some she would have spit or dribbled it onto her front, as she drools very heavily even at this age, likely due in part to her tongue tie). I saw no evidence that she'd ingested any. Her hands smelled very faintly of it, so I ran her into the kitchen and scrubbed them off just in case. I stripped her and double-checked everything: clothes, breath, skin… and still found no evidence she'd even touched the stuff. But the area still smelled very strongly of chlorine.
I told Tempest to take Z to the playroom and went back over to the spot the bleach was sitting, knelt down and carefully inspected the carpet. My knee started feeling hot, and then started feeling like it was burning. I rose up and saw that my jeans now had a patch over the knee that was quickly lightning… there was a puddle of bleach on the carpet. THE BRAND NEW FUCKING CARPET IN THE BRAND NEW PLACE. The carpet that the manager stressed had only just been put in last week. Cue epic freak out.
I grabbed the first absorbent thing I could see that wasn't clothes - a large piece of fleecy fabric from my sewing supplies - threw it down and just started scrubbing and blotting the shit out of the carpet. I grabbed hot water and dish soap and poured it on, sponged, blotted, scrubbed and prayed my heart out. Half-way through this my knee was burning and itching like hell and I remembered that it still had bleach all over it from kneeling in the spill. I stripped off my pants, grabbed a disposable baby wipe to clean off my knee and kept working. The baby wipe didn't really do anything… the burn had already set in, and it was really starting to hurt a lot. But that didn't matter because omfg bleach spill on the brand new carpet!
I worked at this for a good ten minutes before it occurred to me that I should have grabbed gloves out of the cleaning supply box before I started. My fingers had now joined my knee in the itchy-burny-chemical-spill party on my skin (mishap lucky #13!). They were bright red, puffy and peeling. The carpet looked like it was fine now and the "pool" smell had all but disappeared, so I put everything away and ran into the kitchen to deal with my burned hands.
It was around this point that my dad and Curtis returned from the last drop to find me standing in the kitchen half-naked, burned to shit, crying and surrounded by wadded up baby wipes, towels and piles of bleached fabric scraps. They had been gone about 11 minutes.
After everything that had gone horribly wrong over that move, dad just sort of stood there taking it in for a second, then pumped his fists angrily in the air and jokingly yelled, "Stop fucking up!". We laughed, albeit weakly, and he gave me a big hug before he left for the night.
My fingers suffered a pretty bad chemical burn; it seems to have taken off a good section of my fingerprints. A few days later all the cracks opened up and created terribly painful sores. It's been almost a week and a half since it happened, and they still haven't recovered. The worst part is that due to the burning and peeling on my fingers, none of my touch-sensitive devices (tablet, phone, wii, etc) will pick up my fingers and I can't use them properly. Trying to text Curtis is incredibly frustrating. I can't feel a goddamn thing when I touch stuff either.
On the first Curtis wasn't going into work until around 2pm so we spent the entire morning cleaning the old place top to bottom. My dad came over to help out so we could get things done a little faster; he and Curtis worked on the more physically taxing things (like the fridge and underneath the appliances) while I went room to room doing walls, baseboards, windows, sills, eves and sweeping.
Our amazing friends James and Adena came in half-way through the day to bring us coffee and a sandwich bar, just completely out of the blue, which was a ray of sunshine we desperately needed to have after all this stress. They even stayed a bit and helped out with some of the cleaning.
After Curtis left it was down to just dad and I, and we worked without cease until almost 6pm. My sister was watching Z until around 3 (following that she had to be in the house with us, which was a trial and a half) and my mom picked up the Elders from school and kept them with her until it was time to go.
Originally we'd planned on having the 'move out inspection' that afternoon, but crazy/old landlady had let us know that her schedule was really rough that day so if we needed an extra night we could just give her a call and push it to the 2nd instead. The only thing we had left to do was the oven, and the cleaner works best if left overnight, so I gave her a call and let her know that it was up to her to decide what was easiest: do it now and check on the oven tomorrow, or wait until tomorrow when her schedule was better and do the inspection then. She was kind and polite on the phone and admitted that the 2nd was a lot easier on her, so we rescheduled for the next afternoon, packed up all our cleaning supplies and went home.
I asked my dad to be present during her inspection, because I had a feeling her rather unnaturally kind demeanour was going to change as soon as this began. Turns out that was a good idea, because as soon as we entered the house she started flipping the fuck out.
That house looked damn beautiful, especially considering a family of 5 was living in it for over six years, and she complained about fucking everything. The fact that her cheap ass particle-board cabinet in the bathroom was scuffed, the fact that the mysterious towel rack she never bought had not been magically installed sometime during our time living there, the fact that there was a cobweb in the vaulted ceiling upstairs, the fact that the kitchen lights had burned out the day before…
My dad stopped her half-way through one of her rants and asked that she calm down and speak politely because there was no need to freak the fuck out. She immediately screamed at him, "Stop harassing me! You can just LEAVE!"
He quietly said he would not leave, because he had every right to be there given that I had requested him as a witness.
The best part was when she screamed about the ancient heater in Xan's room having a broken cover, and claimed it would cost $350 to fix. When dad heard this he asked her to clarify, and she lowered it to $100 or $150. Dad pointed out that those heaters aren't even made anymore, it's that old, and a replacement costs roughly $35. She spun around and again told him to get out and stop harassing her. He calmly said that he wasn't harassing her, and explained, "This is literally my job. I'm a contractor. I know how much these things cost. It's about $35 and takes maybe ten minutes to install; no special skill needed."
She rambled for the next three minutes about how difficult and costly it was to shut off the breaker, connect a wire, and how no contractor in his right mind would charge her for ten minutes of time. He was genuinely confused: anyone can do that, really it's not hard, but conceded that if she needed someone to install it they'd probably charge her for a half hour… but that's still nowhere near $150-$350 worth of work. She started to freak at him again, asking him to leave, at which point he said again that he had every right to remain and told her flat out that the heating unit is so old and in such bad shape that she should be ashamed of herself for renting a unit to a family with such terrible and dangerous electrical work inside rooms that could be occupied by children.
That made me feel warm and happy inside. I love my dad.
Once she realized that she couldn't intimidate him, or continue to knowingly lie to me about costs, she became noticeably flustered and upset. She wandered through the rest of the house mumbling to herself about damage, but did not actually talk to us directly. At the end she once again said that we were responsible for an issue with lost rent from my mother's tenancy 4-5 years ago (spoiler: we're not, we've checked on this) and offered to return to us a "generous" amount of about 30% of our deposit. I told her I'd like her to send me an itemized list of the damage and the costs by email so that I could look it over and discuss it with Curtis. She agreed to that, and we parted.
Dad walked me to the car and told me that if we can up it to 50% then we should just walk away and be done with her. I agreed; she's fucking crazy but there's a limit to how much I can take. He asked me to forward the email to him once we got it so he can check the prices she's quoting.
It took her seven days to get the email out… and lord, it's a riot. She has in there things like "cobwebs" listed under damage, and estimates 5 hours of cleaning time to remove them at $30/hr.
And 'garbage left by driveway' (stuff for free cycle that was gone in less than 24 hours), and she lists dumping and hauling fees at over $50… even though the area's dump is 6 blocks away, is free to use, and most importantly she didn't actually do this.
She also charges us for two days' rent in October, even though we had moved out on the 30th of September and no one and no thing occupied the unit during this time. She's charging us for two days of rent because we rescheduled the inspection for the 2nd. This is against the terms of the RTA in about six different ways. For one she's supposed to provide us with two possible times/dates for a moving out inspection and if neither of them work we have to make 'every effort' to find one that fits both our schedules. She's not allowed to charge rent money for that.
That also isn't considered "damage" and wouldn't be a part of the damage deposit - it would be claimed separately.
At the end of the ridiculous list (the one valid thing she had on there was that we'd forgotten to clean one of the window tracks. Which takes about 15 minutes - 5 of actual scrubbing and 10 of leaving a bleach spray on it to sit. She has it listed as 3+ hours of work at $50/hr) she claims that the actual damage is far more than 5k, but she's still going to "Generously offer" to return the 30% of our deposit.
Now, if I was a landlord and I had tenants that genuinely did thousands of dollars of damage to a unit… I would not be offering to generously return ANY of their deposit. Because I'd have easy proof that they did a lot of fucking damage to it. Thousands of damage is pretty evident, man. That is not a small number. I seriously do not get her logic.
So, yeah, back to court we go. Everyone is saying this is another easy win, not only because of the easy win last time and the mountains of evidence we have against her, but because she has no moving in inspection, no images of the unit prior to this, and the only real claims she has against us are on things that are so old they should have been replaced many years ago. For instance, according to the tenancy laws we're not responsible for damage/replacement costs of 10+ year old carpets and 15+ year old baseboards. Just like how we're not responsible for chips in paint when we've lived there longer than 4 years - all of those things are considered wear and tear due to how things naturally degrade over time and heavy use.
I don't want to do court again, but this is fucking stupid.
BUT…
At least now we're through the worst of it: we're out of the house, we're (mostly) away from her, and we're loving this new place. As of this posting we've been here a week and a half and love it so damn much. The space, the location (the driving to school every day sucks but it's a small price to pay for everything else), the community and everything.
It's so nice to have a property manager that actually cares about the community and the homes and does everything by the book. When we let her know that one of the kitchen drawer gliders is broken, she got back to us within an hour to say that she'd send out a note for it to be fixed. By the following morning we got a message in our mailslot saying that someone was coming no later than three days to fix it. Fucking amazing.
There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. Brown bunnies, white bunnies, grey bunnies, black bunnies, baby bunnies! The kids in the community are always out there chasing them with intent to catch one (without success, I might add), and the other day I saw what looked like 3 or 4 possibly stoned teenagers running after a pair of them with a laundry basket. They were also not successful. They're huge pests, apparently, and there's a trap and release program going on… but the grass and flowers in this area are so appetizing that none of the bunnies want to go after the fruits and veggies they put in the live traps.
Last week there was a teeny tiny brown baby bunny hiding under our stroller outside the front door. It was no bigger than the palm of my hand. Swoon.
We have a huge, deep soaker tub! I hate baths, but if I needed to take one for sore muscles I can submerge to my neck without issue. It's also deep enough that when I'm giving the kids a bath I only need to fill it up around 1/3 of the way and that means the chance of splash tsunamis is much better. And thank god for that. We had a bath night this evening for Xan and Zephyra and there was like… no mess to clean up afterward.
The kids have already met some friends in this area and are actually willing to go outside and play. I mean, getting Xan moving is still a trial because he's Xan, but I can generally convince them to spend time out of the house without too much effort because there are ACTUAL CHILDREN THEIR AGE to play with.
This one isn't about the house but I wanted to include it anyway.
For Xan's birthday he wanted a loft bed, since him and Tempest separated rooms some time ago and she has a queen-sized futon that she sleeps on nowadays. Dad came by this last weekend and modified the old bunk bed he built them into a loft bed for Xan, complete with secret fort underneath (helped by the set of curtains dad's partner generously donated to the cause). Shortly before this I unpacked a particularly old set of boxes that probably haven't been touched since the last time we moved, and I found these weird little cord light thingies that don't seem to serve any real purpose but would look awesome in his fort. When dad was done I took them out and wrapped them around the bottom bunk frame that was bolted to the side for support, and plugged them in. It lights up the whole area and looks pretty kick ass.
Then we put a big stack of comic books including the brand new Adventure Time graphic novels (gifts from James and Adena).
And it was amazing.
(I don't have any proper camera photos of it so these will have to do for now until his room is more 'set up').
Outside
Inside
Curtis and I spent the first week here working non-stop to get things unpacked and organized as fast as we can so we don't end up in a perpetual state of half-moved. I hate that shit; it makes me feel like we live in squalor.
Most importantly, we've been able to sneak off into the rec room - a whole two floors down from the kids' bedrooms - and have five consecutive nights of hot, loud, incredibly amazing kinky sex! This has successfully ebbed some of that horrible amount of tension we were carrying with us through the disastrous move. Well, kinda… I'm thinking we may need another five more days of sex before it's really gone. At least.
Although in the midst of the first attempt at crazy kinky sex, Tempest was too excited to sleep (first night in the house and all) and kept coming down to bother us about random shit.
Where's my water?
My hot water bottle is cold, will you fill it up?
What time do I wake up tomorrow?
How long will it take to drive to school from here?
Where's that book I wanted to read?
My leg has a cramp, will you rub it?
Why aren't you wearing pants?
What are you doing down in the Playmobil room at midnight?
JESUS TEMPEST WE ARE TRYING TO FUCK DOWN HERE, PLEASE GO THE HELL BACK TO BED.
I keep forgetting to do this up but I finally had some time last night to put it together. I talked a bit about my mother undergoing gastric surgery in July, and she said she'd be totally okay with sharing her pictures online in hopes it might inspire others… particularly because she's over 60 and facing a number of health problems and a major disability, so she's not exactly going to pick up marathon running even at the end of a miraculously successful program.
Her starting weight was around 260 or so, and as of two weeks ago she's about 211. She swears she sees almost no difference in her stomach, which is what she's most self-conscious about (and it's swelling is largely due to liver problems) but I see a HUGE difference already. Not just in appearance but also in the way she carries herself and walks. She uses a mobility scooter 95% of the time, but can walk short distances (ie. around her house), this isn't due to her weight but is due to her being disabled. I've come to recognize the way she sort of sways when she walks and I'm so used to it that I can recognize her from a long distance just by her movement. On the days we were moving she watched the kids for us and dropped them off later on, so she got off her scooter to walk inside and I did a double-take because my brain totally didn't clue in that it was her: her walk has totally changed. Once again, she hasn't noticed this, but even Curtis commented on it. She said she experiences a small reduction in pain and has noticed that she can walk further, and a little faster, than she normally is limited to. Those are both hugely amazing things that no one had a lot of hope for change given the severity of her disability and pain levels; so this is super awesome.
She's still fighting with getting accustomed to eating and not triggering nausea or vomiting but at least she's only experienced one 'sugar dump' since the surgery (one was more than enough).
She's already made huge progress, even if she doesn't think so.
She doesn't look particularly thrilled in these photos because she hates having her picture taken, or seeing her pictures (she's happy to share them with my readers; she just doesn't want them up on her wall) and I continually bug her to stop "dressing fat" (Curtis had this problem as he lost weight as well), but she's pretty insistent that this will not change until she's "small enough" to warrant caring. Mom's level of internalized fat hate is pretty overwhelming, and every time I come over I try to talk to her about it a little more, and how being fat is not horrible or bad or always unhealthy or gross or any of the things that I often hear her say. I mean even if she's not receptive now, I don't want that to be the primary message my kids are getting from her about this part of her life… because that's not what it's about. For her it's about her health and well-being because she has a specific set of problems that a reduction in weight can significantly help ease, and she's in a situation where exercise and diet can only go so far due to those problems, but that doesn't mean that fat is a bad word or that being fat makes you unhealthy and bad.
It makes me really sad to hear her talk like that about herself, because she's my mom: she's always been beautiful to me.
Zisms of the Day:
Generally when Zephyra has a poop she'll come up to me and say, "I stinky!", prompting me to take her up for a change. So she came up to me in the afternoon going, "Stinky! I stinky!" doing a bow-legged walk for emphasis.
"Are you stinky?" I asked her. She nodded and took my hand, so I led her upstairs and lay her down on the bed and got all the changing supplies. When I took off her diaper I found that not only was it clean, but it was also completely dry. The little turd punk'd me.
"You're not stinky!" I said.
She pointed at me and squealed in hysterical laughter, "HAHA MOMMY! I FART!" Then, before I could react, she jumped off the bed and ran away down the hall completely naked yelling, "FART FART FARRRRRRRT!".
Xanisms of the Day:
#1:
Xan: “You’re the worst parents I’ve ever had!”
Me: “Who were the best?”
Xan: “Well. But. No. You’re the worst I’ve ever SEEN!”
Me: “Have you seen lots?”
Xan: “I JUST HATE YOU, OKAY?” *slams door*
#2:
Xan was mad about the fact that our computer monitor is on the fritz and he can't play games while Tempest is playing on the TV, so I told him he could play games on my iPhone for a bit. When he found it, the last thing I was doing on it was still open, which was a text conversation between Curtis and I from the night before. He thought this meant Curtis had been sending me messages that I'd missed, so he took it upon himself to read it and relay the information to me.
He came running back into the room holding out my phone, saying, "Hey mommy I think daddy's trying to text you!"
"Oh no that's just from last niii…." I'm suddenly hit with the knowledge of what's up on the screen just as Xan interrupted me to ask about it.
"Hey mom, what does 'horny' mean?"
I briefly considered lying and answering, "When you really really want to spend time with someone" but I just know that's going to result in a phone call from school about how Xan told an entire classroom that he was horny for his best friend. Because that's completely something he'd do.
Links of the Day
Self-portrait of the artist giving birth - NSFW for nudity and blood. This short video explains the motivations of artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde when she created a series of self-portraits of herself immediately following a (unassisted from what I can gather) homebirth of her child. Bloody, soft, still attached and glowing in happiness… they are beautiful and honest.
Why ending the mommy wars is misguided and dangerous - Every time I see another "we're on board with stopping mommy wars" story it makes me feel pissy, and this article beautifully outlines why. Assholes are assholes no matter what; that's not a "mommy" problem. And the idea of stopping all conversation and education about parenting issues or controversial topics? Not a smart one. By doing that we strip parents of their right to choose, and more importantly their right to make informed choices.That's letting the terrorists win, guys. And by terrorists I mean the corporations that give no shits about you or your kid (and just want to manipulate you into brand loyalty), the patriarchy, and social/class barriers that force us into corners where we have no choices at all. Framing all of that as some sort of social problem between catty mothers is both inaccurate and stupid.
"Die like a man": The toxic masculinity of Breaking Bad - SPOILER ALERT! Don't worry, the title isn't a spoiler - the whole point of the series is Walt dealing with the risk of death from cancer and how his ego, masculinity, etc wraps into that fear and his subsequent transformation and domination of those around him through that. How and when he (or others) 'die like men' is a theme (and saying) that is frequently used within the series. This article is a truly fascinating look (and critique) of those ideas and how they are woven through the show.
Computer teaches itself English so it can play Civilization V - This is amazing and also really kind of scary. Computers learn how to read instructions manuals and apply them to video games, skyrocketing their success in winning from 46% to 79%. This means that they have to understand the meaning of words and learn how to apply them to experiences within the game, as the instructions aren't "how to win" but rather "tips and suggestions". The article explains it more in depth, really it's amazing.
NICU program that gives parents charge of baby's care reduces stress - This is such an amazing program, and an idea so painfully obvious to many NICU veterans. I hope this goes nationwide soon.
"There was a 25 per cent improvement in weight gain of the babies who were looked after by the parents. Breastfeeding rates doubled from 40-something per cent to over 80 per cent. Infection rates fell from 11 per cent in the nurse group to zero in the parent group. Treatment errors dropped by 25 per cent. Parental satisfaction went up, parental stress went down."
Whenever I'm tempted to ask how my karma got so bad to deserve all this, I try to spin it to, "This is the universe letting me know that our time there will be so great and amazing that we have to pay in advance for this unfair amount of good luck and joy". Sometimes that works, but most of the time it sounds like complete bullshit.
The 30th was the first day of big moving, while the next day (the first) was reserved for final cleaning. We never leave a house dirty, and our motto has always been to aim to leave a place better than we found it (within reason, I mean we're not going to repaint the entire place to fix every slight chip or something) and over the time we've lived here we've discovered quite a few things that were never done prior to us moving in… like cleaning under the fridge, or washing the drapes; I always thought they were brown, but it turns out they are beige.
Horrible mishap #1: We got the keys to the new place a few days prior to the 30th and were given permission to start moving stuff in whenever we wanted, so Curtis started doing drops of boxes in effort to clear some space in our (old) house for more cleaning duty and stacking boxes.
At the end of his second drop, he was coming down the stairs and slipped, rotating his ankle 90 degrees and putting all his weight on it. He said the pops he heard were so loud it was echoing off the walls. He didn't admit this at the time, but later told me that he was genuinely frightened that he would not be able to make it home. Never in his life has he hurt himself that badly.
He sat against the wall for a good 15 minutes trying to wait for the pain to subside (it didn't) before limping back to the car and making his way home. By the time he got back there was a lump on the side of his foot bigger than a baseball and the pain was so bad he couldn't bear weight on the foot at all. I forced him to lay down and alternate ice and heat every 20 minutes until we both succumbed to exhaustion. Just before I fell asleep I had him swear up and down he'd go to the clinic the next morning.
He did end up going, although very reluctantly, and the verdict was that it's very badly sprained and he has a torn ligament, but at least it's not broken so he can probably avoid crutches. His foot looked so bad by the next day - oh my god - half of it was black and the other half stained red like someone coloured on his skin with Sharpie markers. The only other time I've seen bruising that bad was when my mom got in a (not very bad) accident and her car's airbag deployed and absolutely beat the ever-loving shit out of her face and breast.
It was rather terrifying to look at. Even three of his toes turned black.
The doctor told him he'd have to take time off work and Curtis replied that time off was not an option in our universe; so instead he was given a buttload of pills, a tensor bandage and told to ice it 4x a day and do as little with it as he can. Naturally this advice was immediately thrown aside and he went back out to do more box drops. FUCKING CURTIS, GODDAMMIT.
Over the next few days it was a ridiculous tug-o-war between the two of us to convince the other to lay down and rest, or not push ourselves too hard. With Curtis half-incapacitated, and my back doing so bad that I could barely move 70% of the time, it was a genuine miracle the house was even half-way done.
I swear to god, Curtis was not this stubborn when I met him. It used to take hours just to convince him a slight cough was not reason enough to curl up and die. When I jokingly asked him, "Where did you learn to be this way?"
He responded dramatically, "You, alright? I learned it from watching you!"
Oh, fuck you Curtis.
His entire "weekend" off work was spent madly packing, cleaning, and taking alternating shifts taking care of the children, having short breaks, and doing endless amounts of work. It made it feel like we had no time off at all - probably because we didn't - so by the end we were both really on edge. Moving tends to put an incredible strain on relationships anyway, but we also hadn't managed to have sex in like two weeks due to my mouth surgery plus all of this shit, so that really didn't help. These days two weeks is practically two years for us, so the sexual frustration levels were quickly skyrocketing.
On one of the final days I felt like I did nothing but scream at my kids for 20 continuous hours. I felt so bad about it that I tried to make it up to them the next day by allowing roughly 8 hours of screen time while I worked. I spent most of this time so stressed out I could barely hold my shit together. Even going to bed at night was impossible without a constant stream of anxiety nightmares. The nightmares don't even make sense, either. I mean it was all weird, random shit like not being able to find my way through somebody's basement. I found another wall, cue life-ending panic attack and wake up drenched in sweat!
Horrible mishap #2: My dad was helping to front our security deposit for the new place until we sorted out what was happening with the old one (hint: more court!), and we had originally planned on having the rest of it dropped off to the property manager on the last Friday before move-in day. When I called him to check on that, he reminded me that he was in Kelowna all week and won't be back until Monday (the first). Which is also when the trailer is reserved for (his vehicle has a hitch and ours doesn't, so he offered to rent the trailer instead since he can actually pull it).
On top of that, Curtis just had to fire someone at work for being a huge douchebag (seriously what kind of asshole tells his superiors that if he isn't given a requested day off during one of the busiest times, that he'll just "not show up"?), which means he has to pull double shifts two days in a row to cover for the loss. Both of those days were OUR MOVING DAYS, gifting us with Horrible Mishap #3.
So all those wonderful schedules we had flawlessly set up weeks in advance to ensure that moving day was as low stress as possible? Yeah, they're all gone now. Now it was just little disabled me, all by myself, doing everything … somehow… until Curtis got home at anywhere from 6-9pm.
This was a pretty panic-inducing thing, and I was absolutely freaking the fuck out until one of my closest friends saved the day by offering to help me out up until Curtis got off work. She single-handedly saved the move from being my worst nightmare, and instead downgraded it to "a catastrophe" instead. This was a significant improvement.
Of course, as soon as she arrived, the worst storm of the year started and our windshield wipers don't work properly (Horrible Mishap #4) so we did most of the back-and-forth drops while fearing for our lives. But at least the kids were all being looked after during this so their presence wasn't adding to that stress.
(Mishaps #5 through #9) Z had obviously picked up on all the stress and was behaving like she was on drugs. The last night of the move she started that cyclic toddler mess-making thing where they create some horrific mess and while you're cleaning that up they start in on another one. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And unless you're fortunate enough to have someone to take them out of the house for you, this continues until you finally lose our goddamn mind. We call this the perpetual mess machine, and it is a skill unique to 2 year olds.
The first plague began as the Elders and Z were all sitting on the couch zoning out to Digimon or something. I asked Tempest to be in charge of watching the baby for two minutes while I walked into the other room to put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I was gone literally 120 seconds. I did nothing but walk in, spin a dial, dump two armfuls of clothes in the machine, and then walk back.
As I returned to the kitchen I was immediately hit with a wall of carpet cleaner smell. As in the expensive carpet cleaner soap that came with our carpet shampoo machine rental. When I rounded the corner into the living room I saw Zephyra standing naked (she was clothed when I walked away two minutes earlier) with a nearly-empty bottle of carpet cleaner in her hands. The rest was spread out in a big sudsy pool stretching from the kitchen, outward through the living room. ALL OF IT. Wall to fucking wall.
And where were the elders who were supposed to be helping out? Nowhere to be found, of course.
Apparently they saw a dog walk by - I'm not even kidding - and they leapt off the couch and ran outside to ask the owner if they could pet it. At the very least they locked the door behind them, believing that to be the most responsible solution.
I briefly chased Z around the incredibly slippery room (thank god it was sealed hardwood) and after another minute finally managed to wrest the bottle from her hands. She immediately flopped onto the floor in a tearful heap, and continued to lay there with her head in her hands for 15 minutes, screaming and moaning in anguish while I carefully sponged up as much of the cleaner as possible and squeezed it back into the bottle. I saved about half of it. It took 35 minutes.
The second plague of toddler destruction came in the form of kafir lime leaves. I don't even know how she got ahold of these things. We have two bags of them leftover from god knows what and they were already packed away in a box that remained taped shut until after we moved in and unpacked the kitchen, but SOMEHOW she got both bags out of it. She's like a fucking messy Houdini.
I was cleaning the kitchen cabinets when I heard a strange crunching noise. I looked up and saw a small trail of dried leaves that Xan was very purposefully stepping on, delicately moving from one to the next, crushing each into smithereens all over the floor. I got up to yell at him about it, believing that he'd dragged them in from the yard, but as I stepped over the baby gate I realized that the leaves extended far beyond the little row Xan had walked over. They were spread all over the couch, the floor in front of the couch, and were scattered throughout most of the living room. There were hundreds of them. I don't even understand how that many fit into the little freezer bags they'd been stored in!
I was completely dumbfounded.
I made Xan clean up most of it due to his deliberate crunching, and held the baby aside while he finished. I put her down briefly so I could help sweep the remaining debris into a dust pan, and once I was finished I walked back into the kitchen to throw it away and saw that baby had managed to climb up onto the counter, into the cupboard and grab a tin of cocoa powder. In the time it took me to sweep up the lime leaves into a dust bin she had spread cocoa powder from wall to wall in the kitchen. Everything was brown: her body, the floor, the cupboards, the counters, the walls… EVERYTHING.
I picked up the baby and threw her in the bath to rinse the cocoa out of her hair, then let her go briefly to sit in the mostly empty guest bedroom with Tempest while I cleaned up the cocoa.
When I went to get her in there, I realized Tempest had gone into another room some time before, and left behind the second coming of kafir lime leaves. It seemed as though she'd stashed half a bag in there somewhere between her first two adventures, and now that one was spread and crushed all over the room. Wall to wall.
So I put her back in the living room with the Elders, locked all adjoining doors, secured the baby gate to the kitchen and swept up that room.
By the time I dumped the bin out, I could already hear Tempest's, "Uh-oh… Mommy?"
One litre of water all over the living room floor, picking up the remnants of the lime leaves and any other food particles I may have missed. Wall to wall in the living room. She had climbed a bookshelf to get ahold of my water bottle and learned how to unscrew the top.
By the end of that run I was actually crying.
All of that took place within 15 minutes.
But it wasn't just me that had a horrible time. Horrible Mishap #10 was when Curtis got out of work and went to retrieve his bike, finding that not only had the handlebars been stolen, but in the process the thief had cut or ripped off every single wire and line.
… why handlebars?
The following morning all the remaining lights in the kitchen burnt out (not quite horrible, but still counts as Mishap #11), and they're this weird 'lifetime warranty' kind that requires a special tool to get out of their socket (which crazy/current landlady has). So there's that. We did the last remnants of packing and cleaning (all of which were centred in the kitchen) in near darkness.
By the time we reached the end of the first move night (the 30th) I was so happy to be done with the worst of it that I didn't care about anything else anymore. I felt numbed to any other disasters, and assured myself that nothing else could possibly get to me at this point. I've reached the absolute pinnacle of anxiety of bullshit.
And of course, now that I've said that… Mishap #12.
My father helped with the last load of boxes and it was late enough that Curtis and him just started piling them haphazardly around the living room to be dealt with later. All we wanted was to stop and go to bed. One of the boxes he left lying around held all of our cleaning supplies, including a bottle of Clorox bleach. I didn't see him bring this one in, and did not think to remind him to put it in a closet somewhere and not within the baby's reach.
Within five minutes of his unloading the last few boxes, Tempest remarked, "Why does it smell like a pool?" and before I could say, "Whaa?" the baby came running up to me going, "Yucky!".
It didn't take long for me to put two and two together and promptly start freaking the fuck out, believing that she had been drinking the bleach. I scrambled through the house looking for the evidence to back this up before I went too far off the deep end, and eventually came upon the box of cleaning supplies that my father had put on the floor next to a hall closet. The bleach was the only thing removed from the box, and the top was off. I could smell it, but couldn't see anywhere it had been spilled. Z wandered over and I meticulously checked her clothes, hair, hands and smelled her breath. She had no bleach or liquid spills on her body, none on her clothes (if she'd drank some she would have spit or dribbled it onto her front, as she drools very heavily even at this age, likely due in part to her tongue tie). I saw no evidence that she'd ingested any. Her hands smelled very faintly of it, so I ran her into the kitchen and scrubbed them off just in case. I stripped her and double-checked everything: clothes, breath, skin… and still found no evidence she'd even touched the stuff. But the area still smelled very strongly of chlorine.
I told Tempest to take Z to the playroom and went back over to the spot the bleach was sitting, knelt down and carefully inspected the carpet. My knee started feeling hot, and then started feeling like it was burning. I rose up and saw that my jeans now had a patch over the knee that was quickly lightning… there was a puddle of bleach on the carpet. THE BRAND NEW FUCKING CARPET IN THE BRAND NEW PLACE. The carpet that the manager stressed had only just been put in last week. Cue epic freak out.
I grabbed the first absorbent thing I could see that wasn't clothes - a large piece of fleecy fabric from my sewing supplies - threw it down and just started scrubbing and blotting the shit out of the carpet. I grabbed hot water and dish soap and poured it on, sponged, blotted, scrubbed and prayed my heart out. Half-way through this my knee was burning and itching like hell and I remembered that it still had bleach all over it from kneeling in the spill. I stripped off my pants, grabbed a disposable baby wipe to clean off my knee and kept working. The baby wipe didn't really do anything… the burn had already set in, and it was really starting to hurt a lot. But that didn't matter because omfg bleach spill on the brand new carpet!
I worked at this for a good ten minutes before it occurred to me that I should have grabbed gloves out of the cleaning supply box before I started. My fingers had now joined my knee in the itchy-burny-chemical-spill party on my skin (mishap lucky #13!). They were bright red, puffy and peeling. The carpet looked like it was fine now and the "pool" smell had all but disappeared, so I put everything away and ran into the kitchen to deal with my burned hands.
It was around this point that my dad and Curtis returned from the last drop to find me standing in the kitchen half-naked, burned to shit, crying and surrounded by wadded up baby wipes, towels and piles of bleached fabric scraps. They had been gone about 11 minutes.
After everything that had gone horribly wrong over that move, dad just sort of stood there taking it in for a second, then pumped his fists angrily in the air and jokingly yelled, "Stop fucking up!". We laughed, albeit weakly, and he gave me a big hug before he left for the night.
My fingers suffered a pretty bad chemical burn; it seems to have taken off a good section of my fingerprints. A few days later all the cracks opened up and created terribly painful sores. It's been almost a week and a half since it happened, and they still haven't recovered. The worst part is that due to the burning and peeling on my fingers, none of my touch-sensitive devices (tablet, phone, wii, etc) will pick up my fingers and I can't use them properly. Trying to text Curtis is incredibly frustrating. I can't feel a goddamn thing when I touch stuff either.
On the first Curtis wasn't going into work until around 2pm so we spent the entire morning cleaning the old place top to bottom. My dad came over to help out so we could get things done a little faster; he and Curtis worked on the more physically taxing things (like the fridge and underneath the appliances) while I went room to room doing walls, baseboards, windows, sills, eves and sweeping.
Our amazing friends James and Adena came in half-way through the day to bring us coffee and a sandwich bar, just completely out of the blue, which was a ray of sunshine we desperately needed to have after all this stress. They even stayed a bit and helped out with some of the cleaning.
After Curtis left it was down to just dad and I, and we worked without cease until almost 6pm. My sister was watching Z until around 3 (following that she had to be in the house with us, which was a trial and a half) and my mom picked up the Elders from school and kept them with her until it was time to go.
Originally we'd planned on having the 'move out inspection' that afternoon, but crazy/old landlady had let us know that her schedule was really rough that day so if we needed an extra night we could just give her a call and push it to the 2nd instead. The only thing we had left to do was the oven, and the cleaner works best if left overnight, so I gave her a call and let her know that it was up to her to decide what was easiest: do it now and check on the oven tomorrow, or wait until tomorrow when her schedule was better and do the inspection then. She was kind and polite on the phone and admitted that the 2nd was a lot easier on her, so we rescheduled for the next afternoon, packed up all our cleaning supplies and went home.
I asked my dad to be present during her inspection, because I had a feeling her rather unnaturally kind demeanour was going to change as soon as this began. Turns out that was a good idea, because as soon as we entered the house she started flipping the fuck out.
That house looked damn beautiful, especially considering a family of 5 was living in it for over six years, and she complained about fucking everything. The fact that her cheap ass particle-board cabinet in the bathroom was scuffed, the fact that the mysterious towel rack she never bought had not been magically installed sometime during our time living there, the fact that there was a cobweb in the vaulted ceiling upstairs, the fact that the kitchen lights had burned out the day before…
My dad stopped her half-way through one of her rants and asked that she calm down and speak politely because there was no need to freak the fuck out. She immediately screamed at him, "Stop harassing me! You can just LEAVE!"
He quietly said he would not leave, because he had every right to be there given that I had requested him as a witness.
The best part was when she screamed about the ancient heater in Xan's room having a broken cover, and claimed it would cost $350 to fix. When dad heard this he asked her to clarify, and she lowered it to $100 or $150. Dad pointed out that those heaters aren't even made anymore, it's that old, and a replacement costs roughly $35. She spun around and again told him to get out and stop harassing her. He calmly said that he wasn't harassing her, and explained, "This is literally my job. I'm a contractor. I know how much these things cost. It's about $35 and takes maybe ten minutes to install; no special skill needed."
She rambled for the next three minutes about how difficult and costly it was to shut off the breaker, connect a wire, and how no contractor in his right mind would charge her for ten minutes of time. He was genuinely confused: anyone can do that, really it's not hard, but conceded that if she needed someone to install it they'd probably charge her for a half hour… but that's still nowhere near $150-$350 worth of work. She started to freak at him again, asking him to leave, at which point he said again that he had every right to remain and told her flat out that the heating unit is so old and in such bad shape that she should be ashamed of herself for renting a unit to a family with such terrible and dangerous electrical work inside rooms that could be occupied by children.
That made me feel warm and happy inside. I love my dad.
Once she realized that she couldn't intimidate him, or continue to knowingly lie to me about costs, she became noticeably flustered and upset. She wandered through the rest of the house mumbling to herself about damage, but did not actually talk to us directly. At the end she once again said that we were responsible for an issue with lost rent from my mother's tenancy 4-5 years ago (spoiler: we're not, we've checked on this) and offered to return to us a "generous" amount of about 30% of our deposit. I told her I'd like her to send me an itemized list of the damage and the costs by email so that I could look it over and discuss it with Curtis. She agreed to that, and we parted.
Dad walked me to the car and told me that if we can up it to 50% then we should just walk away and be done with her. I agreed; she's fucking crazy but there's a limit to how much I can take. He asked me to forward the email to him once we got it so he can check the prices she's quoting.
It took her seven days to get the email out… and lord, it's a riot. She has in there things like "cobwebs" listed under damage, and estimates 5 hours of cleaning time to remove them at $30/hr.
And 'garbage left by driveway' (stuff for free cycle that was gone in less than 24 hours), and she lists dumping and hauling fees at over $50… even though the area's dump is 6 blocks away, is free to use, and most importantly she didn't actually do this.
She also charges us for two days' rent in October, even though we had moved out on the 30th of September and no one and no thing occupied the unit during this time. She's charging us for two days of rent because we rescheduled the inspection for the 2nd. This is against the terms of the RTA in about six different ways. For one she's supposed to provide us with two possible times/dates for a moving out inspection and if neither of them work we have to make 'every effort' to find one that fits both our schedules. She's not allowed to charge rent money for that.
That also isn't considered "damage" and wouldn't be a part of the damage deposit - it would be claimed separately.
At the end of the ridiculous list (the one valid thing she had on there was that we'd forgotten to clean one of the window tracks. Which takes about 15 minutes - 5 of actual scrubbing and 10 of leaving a bleach spray on it to sit. She has it listed as 3+ hours of work at $50/hr) she claims that the actual damage is far more than 5k, but she's still going to "Generously offer" to return the 30% of our deposit.
Now, if I was a landlord and I had tenants that genuinely did thousands of dollars of damage to a unit… I would not be offering to generously return ANY of their deposit. Because I'd have easy proof that they did a lot of fucking damage to it. Thousands of damage is pretty evident, man. That is not a small number. I seriously do not get her logic.
So, yeah, back to court we go. Everyone is saying this is another easy win, not only because of the easy win last time and the mountains of evidence we have against her, but because she has no moving in inspection, no images of the unit prior to this, and the only real claims she has against us are on things that are so old they should have been replaced many years ago. For instance, according to the tenancy laws we're not responsible for damage/replacement costs of 10+ year old carpets and 15+ year old baseboards. Just like how we're not responsible for chips in paint when we've lived there longer than 4 years - all of those things are considered wear and tear due to how things naturally degrade over time and heavy use.
I don't want to do court again, but this is fucking stupid.
BUT…
At least now we're through the worst of it: we're out of the house, we're (mostly) away from her, and we're loving this new place. As of this posting we've been here a week and a half and love it so damn much. The space, the location (the driving to school every day sucks but it's a small price to pay for everything else), the community and everything.
It's so nice to have a property manager that actually cares about the community and the homes and does everything by the book. When we let her know that one of the kitchen drawer gliders is broken, she got back to us within an hour to say that she'd send out a note for it to be fixed. By the following morning we got a message in our mailslot saying that someone was coming no later than three days to fix it. Fucking amazing.
There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. Brown bunnies, white bunnies, grey bunnies, black bunnies, baby bunnies! The kids in the community are always out there chasing them with intent to catch one (without success, I might add), and the other day I saw what looked like 3 or 4 possibly stoned teenagers running after a pair of them with a laundry basket. They were also not successful. They're huge pests, apparently, and there's a trap and release program going on… but the grass and flowers in this area are so appetizing that none of the bunnies want to go after the fruits and veggies they put in the live traps.
Last week there was a teeny tiny brown baby bunny hiding under our stroller outside the front door. It was no bigger than the palm of my hand. Swoon.
We have a huge, deep soaker tub! I hate baths, but if I needed to take one for sore muscles I can submerge to my neck without issue. It's also deep enough that when I'm giving the kids a bath I only need to fill it up around 1/3 of the way and that means the chance of splash tsunamis is much better. And thank god for that. We had a bath night this evening for Xan and Zephyra and there was like… no mess to clean up afterward.
The kids have already met some friends in this area and are actually willing to go outside and play. I mean, getting Xan moving is still a trial because he's Xan, but I can generally convince them to spend time out of the house without too much effort because there are ACTUAL CHILDREN THEIR AGE to play with.
This one isn't about the house but I wanted to include it anyway.
For Xan's birthday he wanted a loft bed, since him and Tempest separated rooms some time ago and she has a queen-sized futon that she sleeps on nowadays. Dad came by this last weekend and modified the old bunk bed he built them into a loft bed for Xan, complete with secret fort underneath (helped by the set of curtains dad's partner generously donated to the cause). Shortly before this I unpacked a particularly old set of boxes that probably haven't been touched since the last time we moved, and I found these weird little cord light thingies that don't seem to serve any real purpose but would look awesome in his fort. When dad was done I took them out and wrapped them around the bottom bunk frame that was bolted to the side for support, and plugged them in. It lights up the whole area and looks pretty kick ass.
Then we put a big stack of comic books including the brand new Adventure Time graphic novels (gifts from James and Adena).
And it was amazing.
(I don't have any proper camera photos of it so these will have to do for now until his room is more 'set up').
Outside
Inside
Curtis and I spent the first week here working non-stop to get things unpacked and organized as fast as we can so we don't end up in a perpetual state of half-moved. I hate that shit; it makes me feel like we live in squalor.
Most importantly, we've been able to sneak off into the rec room - a whole two floors down from the kids' bedrooms - and have five consecutive nights of hot, loud, incredibly amazing kinky sex! This has successfully ebbed some of that horrible amount of tension we were carrying with us through the disastrous move. Well, kinda… I'm thinking we may need another five more days of sex before it's really gone. At least.
Although in the midst of the first attempt at crazy kinky sex, Tempest was too excited to sleep (first night in the house and all) and kept coming down to bother us about random shit.
Where's my water?
My hot water bottle is cold, will you fill it up?
What time do I wake up tomorrow?
How long will it take to drive to school from here?
Where's that book I wanted to read?
My leg has a cramp, will you rub it?
Why aren't you wearing pants?
What are you doing down in the Playmobil room at midnight?
JESUS TEMPEST WE ARE TRYING TO FUCK DOWN HERE, PLEASE GO THE HELL BACK TO BED.
I keep forgetting to do this up but I finally had some time last night to put it together. I talked a bit about my mother undergoing gastric surgery in July, and she said she'd be totally okay with sharing her pictures online in hopes it might inspire others… particularly because she's over 60 and facing a number of health problems and a major disability, so she's not exactly going to pick up marathon running even at the end of a miraculously successful program.
Her starting weight was around 260 or so, and as of two weeks ago she's about 211. She swears she sees almost no difference in her stomach, which is what she's most self-conscious about (and it's swelling is largely due to liver problems) but I see a HUGE difference already. Not just in appearance but also in the way she carries herself and walks. She uses a mobility scooter 95% of the time, but can walk short distances (ie. around her house), this isn't due to her weight but is due to her being disabled. I've come to recognize the way she sort of sways when she walks and I'm so used to it that I can recognize her from a long distance just by her movement. On the days we were moving she watched the kids for us and dropped them off later on, so she got off her scooter to walk inside and I did a double-take because my brain totally didn't clue in that it was her: her walk has totally changed. Once again, she hasn't noticed this, but even Curtis commented on it. She said she experiences a small reduction in pain and has noticed that she can walk further, and a little faster, than she normally is limited to. Those are both hugely amazing things that no one had a lot of hope for change given the severity of her disability and pain levels; so this is super awesome.
She's still fighting with getting accustomed to eating and not triggering nausea or vomiting but at least she's only experienced one 'sugar dump' since the surgery (one was more than enough).
She's already made huge progress, even if she doesn't think so.
She doesn't look particularly thrilled in these photos because she hates having her picture taken, or seeing her pictures (she's happy to share them with my readers; she just doesn't want them up on her wall) and I continually bug her to stop "dressing fat" (Curtis had this problem as he lost weight as well), but she's pretty insistent that this will not change until she's "small enough" to warrant caring. Mom's level of internalized fat hate is pretty overwhelming, and every time I come over I try to talk to her about it a little more, and how being fat is not horrible or bad or always unhealthy or gross or any of the things that I often hear her say. I mean even if she's not receptive now, I don't want that to be the primary message my kids are getting from her about this part of her life… because that's not what it's about. For her it's about her health and well-being because she has a specific set of problems that a reduction in weight can significantly help ease, and she's in a situation where exercise and diet can only go so far due to those problems, but that doesn't mean that fat is a bad word or that being fat makes you unhealthy and bad.
It makes me really sad to hear her talk like that about herself, because she's my mom: she's always been beautiful to me.
Zisms of the Day:
Generally when Zephyra has a poop she'll come up to me and say, "I stinky!", prompting me to take her up for a change. So she came up to me in the afternoon going, "Stinky! I stinky!" doing a bow-legged walk for emphasis.
"Are you stinky?" I asked her. She nodded and took my hand, so I led her upstairs and lay her down on the bed and got all the changing supplies. When I took off her diaper I found that not only was it clean, but it was also completely dry. The little turd punk'd me.
"You're not stinky!" I said.
She pointed at me and squealed in hysterical laughter, "HAHA MOMMY! I FART!" Then, before I could react, she jumped off the bed and ran away down the hall completely naked yelling, "FART FART FARRRRRRRT!".
Xanisms of the Day:
#1:
Xan: “You’re the worst parents I’ve ever had!”
Me: “Who were the best?”
Xan: “Well. But. No. You’re the worst I’ve ever SEEN!”
Me: “Have you seen lots?”
Xan: “I JUST HATE YOU, OKAY?” *slams door*
#2:
Xan was mad about the fact that our computer monitor is on the fritz and he can't play games while Tempest is playing on the TV, so I told him he could play games on my iPhone for a bit. When he found it, the last thing I was doing on it was still open, which was a text conversation between Curtis and I from the night before. He thought this meant Curtis had been sending me messages that I'd missed, so he took it upon himself to read it and relay the information to me.
He came running back into the room holding out my phone, saying, "Hey mommy I think daddy's trying to text you!"
"Oh no that's just from last niii…." I'm suddenly hit with the knowledge of what's up on the screen just as Xan interrupted me to ask about it.
"Hey mom, what does 'horny' mean?"
I briefly considered lying and answering, "When you really really want to spend time with someone" but I just know that's going to result in a phone call from school about how Xan told an entire classroom that he was horny for his best friend. Because that's completely something he'd do.
Links of the Day
Self-portrait of the artist giving birth - NSFW for nudity and blood. This short video explains the motivations of artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde when she created a series of self-portraits of herself immediately following a (unassisted from what I can gather) homebirth of her child. Bloody, soft, still attached and glowing in happiness… they are beautiful and honest.
Why ending the mommy wars is misguided and dangerous - Every time I see another "we're on board with stopping mommy wars" story it makes me feel pissy, and this article beautifully outlines why. Assholes are assholes no matter what; that's not a "mommy" problem. And the idea of stopping all conversation and education about parenting issues or controversial topics? Not a smart one. By doing that we strip parents of their right to choose, and more importantly their right to make informed choices.That's letting the terrorists win, guys. And by terrorists I mean the corporations that give no shits about you or your kid (and just want to manipulate you into brand loyalty), the patriarchy, and social/class barriers that force us into corners where we have no choices at all. Framing all of that as some sort of social problem between catty mothers is both inaccurate and stupid.
"Die like a man": The toxic masculinity of Breaking Bad - SPOILER ALERT! Don't worry, the title isn't a spoiler - the whole point of the series is Walt dealing with the risk of death from cancer and how his ego, masculinity, etc wraps into that fear and his subsequent transformation and domination of those around him through that. How and when he (or others) 'die like men' is a theme (and saying) that is frequently used within the series. This article is a truly fascinating look (and critique) of those ideas and how they are woven through the show.
Computer teaches itself English so it can play Civilization V - This is amazing and also really kind of scary. Computers learn how to read instructions manuals and apply them to video games, skyrocketing their success in winning from 46% to 79%. This means that they have to understand the meaning of words and learn how to apply them to experiences within the game, as the instructions aren't "how to win" but rather "tips and suggestions". The article explains it more in depth, really it's amazing.
NICU program that gives parents charge of baby's care reduces stress - This is such an amazing program, and an idea so painfully obvious to many NICU veterans. I hope this goes nationwide soon.
"There was a 25 per cent improvement in weight gain of the babies who were looked after by the parents. Breastfeeding rates doubled from 40-something per cent to over 80 per cent. Infection rates fell from 11 per cent in the nurse group to zero in the parent group. Treatment errors dropped by 25 per cent. Parental satisfaction went up, parental stress went down."